The Uses Of The University

The USES of
the UNIVERSITY

Tlic Godkin Lectures
at Har\'ard University

19^3

The Godkin Lectures on the Essentials of
Free Government and the Duties of the Citizen
were established at Harvard University in 1903
in memory of Edvnn Lawrence Godkin (1831-1902),
They are given annually under the auspices of the
Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration.

The USES of
the UNIVERSITY

CLARK KERR

Presidml of the Umtrsily of California

Han'ard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts

© Cofy-ri^hl ig03 by the President and Fellows of Harrard College
Ail rights reserved.

Second Printing

Distributed in Great Britain ly Oxford University Press, London
Librat}' of Omgress Catalog Card Lfumber: Gg-oojjo

Printed in the UniUd Stales of America

FOREWORD

Universities in America are at a hinge of history:
while connected with their past, they are swinging
in another direction. This volume, based on the 1963
Godkin Lectures, delivered at Harvard University
on April 23, 24, and 25, 1963, attempts to describe
and to evaluate some of the significant new develop-
ments in American higher education. The title,
“The Uses of the University,” implies a generally
optimistic tone, for it is not the misuses of the univer-
sity that will mainly concern us. At the same time,
however, it is well to note that in the discussion that
follows, analysis should not be confused with ap-
proval or description with defense.

Although it is one of our oldest social institutions,
the university today finds itself in a quite novel posi-
tion in society. It faces its new role with few prece-
dents to fall back on, with little but platitudes to
mask the nakedness of the change. Instead of plati-
tudes and nostalgic glances backward to what it
once was, the university needs a rigorous look at the
reality of the world it occupies today.

The basic reality, for the university, is the wide-

VI

FOREWORD

Spread recognition that new knowledge is the most
important factor in economic and social growth. We
are just now perceiving that the university’s invisible
product, knowledge, may be the most powerful sin-
gle element in our culture, affecting the rise and fall
of professions and even of social classes, of regions
and even of nations.

Because of this fundamental reality, the university
is being called upon to produce knowledge as never
before — for civic and regional purposes, for national
purposes, and even for no purpose at all beyond the
realization that most knowledge eventually comes
to serve mankind. And it is also being called upon
to transmit knowledge to an unprecedented propor-
tion of the population.

This reality is reshaping the very nature and qual-
ity of the university. Old concepts of faculty-student
relations, of research, of faculty-administration roles
are being changed at a rate without parallel. And
this at a time when it seems that an entire generation
is pounding at the gates and demanding admission.
To the academician, conservative by nature, the
sound made by the new generation often resembles
the howl of a mob. To the politician, it is a signal to
be obeyed. To the administrator, it is a warning that
we are in new times and that the decisions we make
now will be uncommonly productive — both of good
and ill.

Thus the university has come to have a new cen-
trality for all of us, as much for those who never see

FOREWORD

Vll

the ivied halls as for those who pass through them or
reside there.

The university has been a remarkably unstudied
institution until very recently. Seymour Harris was
one of the first of my fellow economists to examine
education as one might any other activity of society
and to subject it to economic analysis. Today edu-
cation, including higher education, is being scruti-
nized in all its aspects. This reflects the increasing
recognition of its uses in economic growth, in inter-
national competition, in political and social as well
as cultural development. One can only wonder
whether the university was a better place before
people began writing and talking so much about
it — before they became so conscious of its uses.

CLARK KERR

Berkel^’, California
June 12 , ig 63

CONTENTS

1 The Idea of a Multiversity i

2 The Realities of the Federal Grant

University 46

3 The Future of the City of Intellect 85

Notes 127

Index

137

The USES of
the UNIVERSITY

I

THE IDEA OF
A MULTIVERSITY

rrn

I HE university started as a single com-
■ munity — a community of masters and

students. It may even be said to have
had a soul in the sense of a central animating prin-
ciple. Today the large American university is, rather,
a whole series of communities and activities held
together by a common name, a common governing
board, and related purposes. This great transforma-
tion is regretted by some, accepted by many, gloried
in, as yet, by few. But it should be understood by all.

The university of today can perhaps be under-
stood, in part, by comparing it with what it once
was — with the academic cloister of Cardinal New-
man, with the research organism of Abraham Flex-
ner. Those are the ideal types from which it has
derived, ideal types which still constitute the illu-
sions of some of its inhabitants. The modern Ameri-
can university, however, is not Oxford nor is it

2

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

Berlin; it is a new type of institution in the world.
As a new type of institution, it is not really private
and it is not really public; it is neither entirely of
the world nor entirely apart from it. It is unique.

“The Idea of a University” was, perhaps, never
so well expressed as by Cardinal Newman when
engaged in founding the University of Dublin a
little over a century ago.* His views reflected the
Oxford of his day whence he had come. A univer-
sity, wrote Cardinal Newman, is “the high pro-
tecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact
and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experi-
ment and speculation; it maps out the territory of
the intellect, and sees that . . . there is neither en-
croachment nor surrender on any side.” He favored
“liberal knowledge,” and said that “useful knowl-
edge” was a “deal of trash.”

Newman was particularly fighting the ghost of
Bacon who some 250 yeare before had condemned
“a kind of adoration of the mind ... by means
whereof men have withdrawn themselves too much
from the contemplation of nature, and the observa-
tions of experience, and have tumbled up and down
in their own reason and conceits.” Bacon believed
that knowledge should be for the benefit and use of
men, that it should “not be as a courtesan, for
pleasure and vanity only, or as a bond-woman, to
acquire and gain to her master’s use; but as a
spouse, for generation, fruit and comfort.”^

To this Newman replied that “Knowledge is

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

3

capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution
of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if
it really be such, is its own reward.” And in a sharp
jab at Bacon he said; “The Philosophy of Utility,
you will say. Gentlemen, has at least done its work;
and I grant it — it aimed low, but it has fulfilled its
aim.” Newman felt that other institutions should
carry on research, for “If its object were scientific
and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a
University should have any students” — an observa-
tion sardonically echoed by today’s students who
often think their professors are not interested in
them at all but only in research. A University train-
ing, said Newman, “aims at raising the intellectual
tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at
purifying the national taste, at supplying true prin-
ciples to popular entliusiasm and fixed aims to
popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and
sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the
exercise of political powers, and refining the inter-
course of private life.” It prepares a man “to fill any
post wTth credit, and to master any subject with
facility.”

This beautiful world was being shattered forever
even as it was being so beautifully portrayed. By
1 85 2, when Newman wrote, the German universities
were becoming the new model. The democratic and
industrial and scientific revolutions were all well
underway in the western world. The gentleman
“at home in any society” was soon to be at home in

4

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

none. Science was beginning to take the place of
moral philosophy, research the place of teaching,
“The Idea of a Modem University,” to use Flex-
ner’s phrase,® was already being born. “A Univer-
sity,” said Flexner in 1930, “is not outside, but inside
the general social fabric of a given era. ... It is not
something apart, something historic, something
that yields as little as possible to forces and influ-
ences that are more or less new. It is on the contrary
... an expression of the age, as well as an influence
operating upon both present and future.”

It was clear by 1930 that “Universities have
changed profoundly — and commonly in the direc-
tion of the social evolution of which they are part.”
This evolution had brought departments into uni-
versities, and still new departments; institutes and
ever more institutes; created vast research libraries;
turned the philosopher on his log into a researcher
in his laboratory or the library stacks; taken medi-
cine out of the hands of the profession and put it
into the hands of the scientists; and much more.
Instead of the individual student, there were the
needs of society; instead of Newman’s eternal “truths
in the natural order,” there was discovery of the
new; instead of the generalist, there was the special-
ist. The university became, in the words of Flexner,
an institution consciously devoted to the pursuit of
knowledge, the solution of problems, the critical
appreciation of achievement and the training of men
at a really high level.” No longer could a single

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

5

individual “master any subject” — Newman’s uni-
versal liberal man was gone forever.

But as Flexner was writing of the “Modem Uni-
versity,” it, in turn, was ceasing to exist. The Berlin
of Humboldt was being violated just as Berlin had
violated the soul of Oxford. The universities were
becoming too many things. Flexner himself com-
plained that they were “secondary schools, voca-
tional schools, teacher-training schools, research
centers, ‘uplift’ agencies, businesses — these and other
things simultaneously.” They engaged in “incredible
absurdities,” “a host of inconsequential things.”
They “needlessly cheapened, vulgarized and mecha-
nized themselves.” Worst of all, they became “ ‘serv-
ice stations’ for the general public.”

Even Harvard. “It is clear,” calculated Flexner,
“that of Harvard’s total expenditures not more than
one-eighth is devoted to the central university dis-
ciplines at the level at which a university ought to
be conducted.” He wondered: “Who has forced
Harvard into this false path? No one. It does as it
pleases; and this sort of thing pleases.” It obviously
did not please Flexner. He wanted Harvard to dis-
own the Graduate School of Business and let it be-
come, if it had to survive it all, the “Boston School
of Business.” He would also have banished all
Schools of Journalism and Home Economics, foot-
ball, correspondence courses, and much else.

It was not only Harvard and other American uni-
versities, but also London. Flexner asked “in what

6

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

sense the University of London is a university at all.

It was only “a federation.”

By 1930, American universities had moved a long
way from Flcxner’s “Modem University where
“The heart of a university is a graduate school of
arts and sciences, the solidly professional schools
(mainly, in America, medicine and law) and certain
research institutes.” They were becoming less and
less like a “genuine university,” by which Flexner
meant “an organism, characterized by highness and
definiteness of aim, unity of spirit and purpose. The
“Modem University” was as nearly dead in 193®
when Flexner wrote about it, as the old Oxford was
in 1852 when Newman idealized it. History moves
faster than the observer’s pen. Neither the ancient
classics and theology nor Ae German philosophers
and scientists could set the tone for the really modem
university — the multiversity.

“The Idea of a Multiversity” has no bard to sing
its praises; no prophet to proclmm its vision; no
guardian to protect its Scmctity, It has its critics, its
detractors, its transgressors. It also has its barkers
selling its wares to all who will listen — and many
do. But it also has its reality rooted in the logic of
history. It is an imperative rather than a reasoned
choice among elegant alternatives.

President Nathan Pusey wrote in his latest annual
report to the members of the Harvard Board of
Overseers that the average date of graduation of the
present Board members was 1924; and much has

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

7

happened to Harvard since 1924. Half of the build-
ings are new. Tlie faculty has grown five-fold, the
budget nearly fifteen-fold. “One can find almost
anywhere one looks similar examples of the effect
wrought in the curriculum and in the nature of the
contemporary university by widening international
awareness, advancing knowledge, and increasingly
sophisticated methods of research. . . . Asia and
Africa, radio telescopes, masers and lasers and de-
vices for interplanetary exploration unimagined in
1924 — these and other developments have effected
such enormous changes in the intellectual orienta-
tion and aspiration of tlie contemporary university
as to have made the university we knew as students
now seem a strangely underdeveloped, indeed a
very simple and an almost unconcerned kind of
institution. And the pace of change continues.”^

Not only at Harvard. The University of California
last year had operating expenditures from all sources
of nearly half a billion dollars, with almost another
100 million for construction; a total employment of
over 40,000 people, more than IBM and in a far
greater variety of endeavors; operations in over a
hundred locations, counting campuses, experiment
stations, agricultural and urban extension centers,
and projects abroad involving more than fifty coun-
tries; nearly 10,000 courses in its catalogues; some
form of contact with nearly every industry, nearly
every level of government, nearly every person in
its region. Vast amounts of expensive equipment

8

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

were serviced and maintained. Over 4,000 babies
were born in its hospitals. It is the world’s largest
purveyor of white mice. It will soon have the world’s
largest primate colony. It will soon also have 100,000
students — 30,000 of them at the graduate level;
yet much less than one third of its expenditures are
directly related to teaching. It already has nearly
200,000 students in extension courses — including
one out of every three lawyers and one out of every
six doctors in the state. And Harvard and California
eire illustrative of many more.

Newman’s “Idea of a University” still has its
devotees — chiefly the humanists and the generalists
and the undergraduates. Flexner’s “Idea of a Mod-
ern University” still has its supporters — chiefly the
scientists and the specialists and the graduate stu-
dents. “The Idea of a Multiversity” has its practi-
tioners — chiefly the administrators, who now num-
ber many of the faculty among them, and the
leadership groups in society at large. The contro-
versies are still around in the faculty clubs and the
student coffee houses; and the models of Oxford
and Berlin and modem Harvard all animate seg-
ments of what was once a “community of masters
and students” with a single vision of its nature and
purpose. These several competing visions of true
purpose, each relating to a different layer of history,
a different web of forces, cause much of the malaise
in the university communities of today. The uni-
versity is so many things to so many different people

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 9

that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with
itself.

How did the multiversity happen? No man
created it; in fact, no man visualized it. It has been
a long time coming about and it has a long way to
go. What is its history? How is it governed? What
is life like within it? Wliat is its justification? Does
it have a future?

THE STRANDS OF HISTORY

The multiversity draws on many strands of his-
tory. To the extent that its origins can be identified,
tliey can be traced to tlie Greeks. But there were
several traditions even then. Plato had his Academy
devoted to truth largely for its own sake, but also
truth for the philosophers who were to be kings.
The Sophists, whom Plato detested so much that
he gave them an evil aura persisting to this day, had
their schools too. These schools taught rhetoric and
other useful skills — they were more interested in
attainable success in life than they were in the un-
attainable truth. The Pythagoreans were concerned,
among other things, with mathematics and astron-
omy. The modern academician likes to trace his
intellectual forebears to the groves of Academe;
but the modern university with its professional
schools and scientific institutes might look equally
to the Sophists and the Pythagoreans. The human-
ists, the professionals, and the scientists all have

10

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

their roots in ancient times. The “Two Cultures” or
the “Three Cultures” are almost as old as culture
itself.

Despite its Greek precursors, however, the uni-
versity is, as Hastings Rashdall wrote, “a distinctly
medieval institution.”® In the Middle Ages it de-
veloped many of the features that prevail today —
a name and a central location, masters with a de-
gree of autonomy, students, a system of lectures, a
procedure for examinations and degrees, and even
an administrative structure with its “faculties.”
Salerno in medicine, Bologna in law, and Paris in
theology and philosophy were the great pace-
setters. The university came to be a center for the
professions, for the study of the classics, for theologi-
cal and philosophical disputes. Oxford and Cam-
bridge, growing out of Paris, developed in their
distinctive ways with their particular emphasis on
the residential college instead of the separate facul-
ties as the primary unit.

By the end of the eighteenth century the Euro-
pean universities had long since become oligarchies,
rigid in their subject matter, centers of reaction in
their societies — opposed, in large part, to the Refor-
mation, unsympathetic to the spirit of creativity of
the Renaissance, antagonistic to the new science.
There was something almost splendid in their dis-
dain for contemporary events. Tliey stood like
castles without windows, profoundly introverted.
But the tides of change can cut very deep. In

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

II

France the universities were swept away by the
Revolution, as they almost had been in England
at the time of Cromwell.

It was in Germany that the rebirth of the uni-
versity took place. Halle had dropped teaching ex-
clusively in Latin in 1693; Gottingen had started
the teaching of history in 1736; but it was the
establishment of Berlin by Wilhelm von Humboldt
in 1809 from his vantage point in the Prussian
Ministry that was the dramatic event. The emphasis
was on philosophy and science, on research, on
graduate instruction, on the freedom of professors
and students {Lehrfreiheit and Lemfreiheit). The de-
partment was created, and the institute. The pro-
fessor was established as a great figure within and
without the university. The Berlin plan spread
rapidly throughout Germany, which was then en-
tering a period of industrialization and intense na-
tionalism following the shock of the defeat at the ;
hands of Napoleon. The university carried with it 1
two great new forces: science and nationalism. It *
is true that the German university system later
bogged down through its uncritical reliance on the
great professorial figure who ruled for life over his
department and institute, and that it could be sub-
verted by Hitler because of its total dependence on
the state. But this does not vitiate the fact that the
German university in the nineteenth century was
one of the vigorous new institutions in the world.

In 1809 when Berlin was founded, the United

12

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

States already had a number of colleges developed
on the model of the colleges at Oxford and Cam-
bridge. They concentrated on Calvinism for the
would-be preacher and classics for the young gentle-
man. Benjamin Franklin had had other ideas for
the University of Pennsylvania, then the College
of Philadelphia, in the 1750’s.® Reflecting Locke,
he wanted “a more useful culture of young minds.”
He was interested in training people for agriculture
and commerce; in exploring science. Education
should “serve manland.” These ideas were not to
take root for another century. Drawing on the
French Enlightenment, Jefferson started the Uni-
versity of Virginia with a broad curriculum in-
cluding mathematics and science, and tvith the
electives that Eliot was to make so famous at
Harvard half a century later. He put great em-
phasis on a library — an almost revolutionary idea
at the time. Again the application of the ideas was
to be long delayed.

The real line of development for the modem
American university began with Professor George
Ticknor at Harvard in 1825. He tried to reform
Harvard on the model of Gottingen where he had
studied, and found that reforming Harvard must
wait for an Eliot with forty years and the powers of
the presidency at his disposal. Yale at the time was

e great center of reaction — its famous faculty
report of 1828 was a ringing proclamation to do
no ling, or at least nothing that had not always

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 1 3

been done at Yale or by God.^ Francis Wayland at
Brown in the 1850’s made a great fight for the
German system, including a program of electives,
as did Henry Tappan at Michigan — both without
success.

Tlien the breakthrough came. Daniel Coit Gil-
man, disenchanted witli the then grim prospects at
California, became the first president of the new
university of Johns Hopkins in 1876. The institu-
tion began as a graduate school with an emphasis
dn researcli. For Flexner, Gilman was the great
hero-figure — and Johns Hopkins “the most stimu-
lating influence that higher education in America
had ever known.” Charles W. Eliot at Harvard
followed the Gilman breakthrough and Harvard
during his period (1869 to 1909) placed great em-
phasis on the graduate school, the professional
school, and research — it became a university. But
Eliot made his o\vn particular contribution by
establishing the elective system permitting students
to choose their own courses of study. Others quickly
followed — Andrew Dickson White at Cornell, James
B. Angell at Michigan, Frederick Barnard at Co-
lumbia, William W. Folwell at Minnesota, David
Starr Jordan at Stanford, William Rainey Harper
at Chicago, Charles K. Adams at Wisconsin, Benja-
min Ide Wheeler at California. The state universi-
ties, just then expanding, followed the Hopkins
idea. Yale and Princeton trailed behind.

The Hopkins idea brought with it the graduate

14

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

school with exceptionally high academic standards
in what was still a rather new and raw civilization;
the renovation of professional education, particu-
larly in medicine; the establishment of the pre-
eminent influence of the department; the creation
of research institutes and centers, of university
presses and learned journals and the “academic
ladder”; and also the great proliferation of courses.
If students were to be free to choose their courses
(one aspect of the Lemfreiheit of the early nineteenth-
century German university), then professors were
free to offer their wares (as Lehrfreiheil^ the other
great slogan of the developing German universities
of a century and a half ago, essentially assured).
The elective system, however, came more to serve
the professors than the students for whom it was
first intended, for it meant that the curriculum was
no longer controlled by educational p)olicy as the
Yale faculty in 1828 had insisted that it should be.
Each professor had his ovm interests, each professor
wanted the status of having his own special course,
each professor got his own course — and university
catalogues came to include 3,000 or more of them.
There was, of course, as a result of the new research,
more knowledge to spread over the 3,000 courses;
^ otherwise the situation would have been impossible.
• In any event, freedom for the student to choose
became freedom for the professor to invent; and the
professors love of specialization has become the

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 1 5

students’ hate of fragmentation. A kind of bizarre
version of academic laissez-faire has emerged. The
student, unlike Adam Smith’s idealized buyer, must
consume — usually at the rate of fifteen hours a week.
The modern university was born.

Along with the Hopkins experiment came the
land grant movement — and these two influences
turned out to be more compatible than might at
first appear. The one was Prussian, the other Amer-
ican; one elitist, the other democratie; one aca-
demically pure, the other sullied by contact with
tlie soil and tlie machine. The one looked to Kant
and Hegel, the otlier to Franklin, Jefferson, and
Lincoln. But they both served an industrializing
nation and they both did it through research and
the training of technical competence. Two strands
of history were woven together in the modern Amer-
ican university. Michigan became a German-style
university and Harvard a land grant type of institu-
tion, without the land.

The land grant movement brought schools of
agriculture and engineering (in Germany relegated
to the Technischc Hoclischtilen), of home economics
and business administration; opened the doors of
universities to the children of farmers and workers,
as well as of the middle and upper classes; intro-
duced agricultural experiment stations and service
bureaus. Allan Nevins in commenting on the Morrill
Act of 1862 said: “The law annexed wide neglected

1 6 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

areas to the domain of instruction. Widening the
gates of opportunity, it made democracy freer, more
adaptable and more kinetic.”®

A major new departure in the land grant move-
ment came before World War I when the land
grant universities extended their activities beyond
their campus boundaries. “The Wisconsin Idea”
came to flower under the progressivism of the first
Roosevelt and the first La Follette. The University
of Wisconsin, particularly during the presidency of
Charles Van Hise (1903 to 1918), entered the
legislative halls in Madison with reform programs,
supported the trade union movement through John
R. Commons, developed agricultural and urban
extension as never before. The university served
the whole state. Other state universities did likewise.
Even private universities, like Chicago and Colum-
bia, developed important extension programs.

New contacts with the community were created.
University athletics became, particularly in the
1920’s, a form of public entertainment, which is not
unknown even in the 1960’s, even in the Ivy League.
Once started, university spectator sports could not
be killed even by the worst of teams or the best of
de-emphasis; and few umversities seriously sought
after either.

A counterrevolution against these developments
was occasionally waged. A. Lawrence Lowell at
Harvard (1909 to 1934) emphasized the under-
graduate houses and concentration of course work,

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY I 7

as against the graduate work and electives of Eliot.
It is a commentary not just on Harvard but also on
the modern American university that Eliot and
Lowell could look in opposite directions and the
same institution could follow them both and glory
in it. Universities have a unique capacity for riding
off in all directions and still staying in the same
place, as Har\'ard has so decisively demonstrated.
At Chicago, long after Lowell, Robert M. Hutchins
tried to take the university back to Cardinal New-
man, to Thomas Aquinas, and to Plato and Aristotle.
He succeeded in reviving the philosophic dialogue
he loves so well and practices so expertly; but Chi-
cago went on being a modem American university.

Out of the counterreformation, however, came
a great new emphasis on student life — particularly
undergraduate. Earnest attempts were made to
create American counterparts of Oxford and Cam-
bridge; residence halls, student unions, intramural
playfields, undergraduate libraries, counseling cen-
ters sprang up in many places during the thirties,
forties, and fifties. This was a long way from the
pure German model, which had provided the stu-
dent with only the professor and the classroom, and
which had led Tappan to abolish dormitories at
Michigan. British influence was back, as it was also
with the introduction of honors programs, tutorials,
independent study.

Out of all these fragments, experiments, and con-
flicts a kind of unlikely consensus has been reached.

i8

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

Undergraduate life seeks to follow the British, who
have done the best with it, and an historical line
that goes back to Plato; the humanists often find
their sympathies here. Graduate life and research
follow the Germans, who once did best with them,
and an historical line that goes back to Pythagoras;
the scientists lend their support to all this. The
“lesser” professions (lesser than law and medicine)
and the service activities follow the American pat-
tern, since the Americans have been best at them,
and an historical line that goes back to the Sophists;
the social scientists are most likely to be sympathetic.
Lowell found his greatest interest in the first, Eliot
in the second, and James Bryant Conant (i 934
1954) in the third line of development and in the
synthesis. The resulting combination does not seem
plausible but it has given America a remarkably
' effective educational institution, A university any-
where can aim no higher than to be as British as
possible for the sake of the undergraduates, as
German as possible for the sake of the graduates and
the research personnel, as American as possible for
the sake of the public at large — and as confused as
possible for the sake of the preservation of the whole
uneasy balance.

THE GOVERNANCE OF THE MULTIVERSITY

The multiversity is an inconsistent institution. It
is not one community but several — the community

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 1 9

of the undergraduate and the community of the
graduate; the community of the humanist, the com-
munity of the social scientist, and the community
of the scientist; the communities of the professional
schools; the community of all the nonacademic per-
sonnel; the community of the administrators. Its
edges are fuzzy— it reaches out to alumni, legislators,
farmers, businessmen, who are all related to one
or more of these internal communities. As an institu-
tion, it looks far into the past and far into the future,
and is often at odds with the present. It serves society
almost slavishly — a society it also criticizes, some-
times unmercifully. Devoted to equality of oppor-
tunity, it is itself a class society. A community, like
the medieval communities of masters and students,
should have common interests; in the multiversity,
they are quite varied, even conflicting. A commu-
nity should have a soul, a single animating prin-
ciple; the multiversity has several — some of them
quite good, although there is much debate on which
souls really deserve salvation.

The multiversity is a name. This means a great
deal more than it sounds as though it might. The
name of the institution stands for a certain standard
of performance, a certain degree of respect, a cer-
tain historical legacy, a characteristic quality of
spirit. This is of the utmost importance to faculty
and to students, to the government agencies and the
industries with which the institution deals. Protec-
tion and enhancement of the prestige of the name

20

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

are central to the multiversity. How good is its
reputation, what John J. Corson calls its “institu-
tional character”?®

Flexner thought of a university as an “organism.”
In an organism, the parts and the whole are inex-
tricably bound together. Not so the multiversity —
many parts can be added and subtracted with little
effect on the whole or even little notice taken or any
blood spilled. It is more a mechanism — a series of
processes producing a series of results — a mechanism
held together by administrative rules and powered
by money.

Hutchins once described the modem university
as a series of separate schools and departments held
together by a central heating system. In an area
where heating is less important and the automobile
more, I have sometimes thought of it as a series of
individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by
a common grievance over parking.

^ It is, also, a system of government like a city, or a
city state: the city state of the multiversity. It may
be inconsistent but it must be governed — not as the
guild it once was, but as a complex entity with
greatly^ fractionalized power. There are several
competitors for this power.

The students. The students had all the power onee;
that was in Bologna. Their guilds ran the university
an dominated the masters. And the students were
tougher on the masters than the masters have ever

een on the students. The Bologna pattern had an

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 2 1

impact on Salamanca and Spain generally and then
in Latin America, where students to this day are
usually found in the top governing councils. Their
impact is generally more to lower than to raise
academic standards although there are exceptions
such as Buenos Aires after Peron under the leader-
ship of Risieri Frondizi. Students also involve the
university as an institution in the national political
controversies of the moment.

Jefferson tried a system of student self-government
in the 1820’s but quickly abandoned it when all the
professors tendered their resignations. He favored
self-government by both students and faculty, but
never discovered how both could have it at the same
time — nor has anybody else. Although Jose Ortega
y Gassett, in addressing the student federation at the
University of Madrid, was willing to turn over the
entire “mission of the university” to the students, he
neglected to comment on faculty reaction.*”

As part of the “Wisconsin idea” before World
War I, there was quite a wave of creation of student
governments. They found their power in the area of
extracurricular activities, where it has remained.
Their extracurricular programs helped broaden stu-
dent life in such diverse fields as debating, theatrical
productions, literary magazines.

Students do have considerable strictly academic
influence, however, quite beyond that with which
they are usually credited. The system of electives
gives them a chance to help determine in which

22

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSnY

areas and disciplines a university \vdll grow. Their
choices, as consumers, guide university expansion
and contraction, and this process is far superior to a
more rigid guild system of producer determination
as in medicine where quotas are traditional. Also
students, by their patronage, designate the univer-
sity teachers. The faculty may, in fact, appoint the
faculty, but \vithin this faculty group the students
choose the real teachers. In a large university a
quarter of the faculty may be selected by the stu-
dents to do half or more of the actual teaching; the
students also “select” ten percent or more to do
almost none at all.

The faculty. The guilds of masters organized and
ran the University of Paris, and later they did the
same at Oxford and Cambridge. Faculty control at
Oxford and Cambridge, through the colleges, has
remained stronger than anyvs'here else over the
centuries, but even there it has been greatly dimin-
. ished in recent times.

In the United States, the first great grant of power
to the faculty of a major university was at Yale when
Jeremiah Day was president (1817 to 1846). It was
during the Day regime that the Yale faculty report
of 1828 was issued. Harrard has had, by contrast, as
McGeorge Bundy has said in his inimitable style, “a
tradition of quite high-handed and centralized
c.xecutivc bcharior — and it has not sufiered, in
balance, as a consequence.”"

Faculties generally in the United States and the

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

23

British Commonwealth, some earlier and some later,
have achieved authority over admissions, approval
of courses, examinations, and granting of degrees —
all handled in a rather routine fashion from the
point of view of the faculty as a whole. They have
also achieved considerable influence over faculty
appointments and academic freedom, which are not
handled routinely. Faculty control and influence in
these areas are essential to the proper conduct of
academic life. Once the elective system was estab-
lished, educational policy became less important to
the faculty, although, as at Harvard under Lowell,
the elective system was modified to call for general
rules on concentration and distribution of work.
Since Harvard adopted its program for general
education in 1945*" and Hutchins left Chicago,
there has been remarkably little faculty discussion of
general educational policy. By contrast, there has
been a great deal in England, particularly in the
“new universities,” where faculty discussion of edu-
cational policy has been very lively, and faculty
influence, as a consequence, substantial.

Organized faculty control or influence over the
general direction of growth of the American multi-
versity has been quite small, as illustrated by the
development of the federal grant university. Indi-
vidual faculty influence, however, has been quite
substantial, even determinative, in the expanding
areas of institutes and research grants. Still it is a
long way from Paris at the time of Abelard.

24

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

Public authority. “Public” authority is a very mixed
entity of emperors and popes, ministers of education,
grants committees, trustees, and Royal Commis-
sions. But almost everywhere, regardless of the
origin of the system, there has come to be a public
authority. Even in the Middle Ages, emperors and
popes, dukes, cardinals, and city councils came to
authorize or establish the universities to make them
legitimate — the guild alone was not enough. When
Henry VIII had trouble about a wife it shook
Oxford and Cambridge to the core.

In modern times, Napoleon was the first to seize
control of a university system. He completely reor-
ganized it and made it part of the nationally ad-
ministered educational system of France, as it
remains to this day. He separated off research activ-
ities and special training institutions for teachers,
engineers, and so forth. The universities became a
series of loosely related professional schools. Not
until the 1890’s were the universities brought back
together as meaningful entities and a measure of
faculty control restored. Soviet Russia has followed
the French pattern with even greater state control.

In Germany, the state governments traditionally
have controlled the universities in great detail. So
also has the government in Italy. In Latin America
a degree of formal autonomy from the government
has either been retained or attained, although
informal reality usually contradicts the theory.

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

25

Even in Great Britain, the “public” has moved in
on the faculties. Royal Commissions have helped
modernize Oxford andT^Cambridge. The Redbrick
and Scottish universities and London either have
had from the beginning or acquired governing
boards of a mixed nature, including lay members
representative of public authority. Since 1919, and
particularly since World War II, the University
Grants Committee has made its influence felt in a
less and less gentle and more and more effective way.

The lay board has been the distinctive American
device for “public” authority in connection with
universities, although the device was used in Hol-
land in the late sixteenth century. Beyond the lay
board in the state universities are the state depart-
ment of finance and the governor and the legislature
with a tendency toward increasingly detailed review.

Richard Hofstadter has made the interesting
observation that the first lay board and the first
effective concept of academic freedom developed in
Holland at the same time; and that academic free-
dom has never been inherited from some Golden
Age of the past but has instead been imported from
the institutions of the surrounding society.^^

Through all these devices, public influences have
been asserted in university affairs. Public influence
has increased as much in Paris as student influence
has declined in Bologna. Everywhere, with the
decreasing exception of Oxford and Cambridge, the

26 the uses of the university

ultimate authority lies in the “public” domain,
cvcry^vherc, with a few exceptions, it is fortunately
not exercised in an ultimate fashion. We have, how
ever, come a long way from the guilds of masters,
the guilds of students, the guilds of masters and
students. The location of power has generally moved
from inside to outside the original community of
masters and students. The nature of the multiversity
makes it inevitable that this historical transfer will
not be reversed in any significant fashion, although
the multiversity docs permit the growth of sub-
cultures which can be relatively autonomous and
can have an impact on the totality.

Tlic distribution of power is of great important^.
In Germany it came to be lodged too completely in
the figure of the full professor at one end and the
minister of education at the other; in Oxford and
Cambridge, at one time, in an oligarchy of profes-
•sors; in the United States, during a substantial
jx:riod, almost exclusively in the president; in I-atin
America, too often, in the students within and the
(wliticians without.

Itiflucmes — external and sani-extcmal. Beyond the
fonnal structure of power, as lodged in students,
faculty, administration, or “public" instrumental-
ities, lie the 5/»urccs of informal influence. Tlic
.American system is particularly sensitive to the
prcsMircs of its many particular publics. Continental
and British universities arc less intertwined with
their jurrounding societies than the American and

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

27

tlius more inward-looking and self-contained. When
“the borders of the campus are the boundaries of our
state,” the lines dividing what is internal from what
is external become quite blurred; taking the campus
to the state brings the state to the campus. In the
so-called “private” universities, alumni, donors,
foundations, the federal agencies, the professional
and business communities bulk large among the
semi-external influences; and in the so-called “pub-
lic” universities, the agricultural, trade union, and
public school communities are likely to be added to
the list, and also a more searching press. The multi-
versity has many “publics” with many interests; and
by the very nature of the multiversity many of these
interests are quite legitimate and others are quite
frivolous.

The administration. The original medieval universi-
ties had at the start nothing that could be identified
as a separate administration, but one quickly devel-
oped. The guild of masters or students selected a
rector; and later there were deans of the faculties.
At Oxford and Cambridge, there came to be the
masters of tlie colleges. In more modern times in
France, Germany, and Italy, the rector has come to
stand between the faculty and the minister of edu-
cation, closer to the minister of education in France
and closer to the faculty in Germany; internally he
has served principally as chairman of the council of
deans where deans still retain substantial authority
as in France and Italy. In Germany the full pro-

28

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

fessor, chairman of his department, director of his
institute, is a figure of commanding authority.

Even in England, even in Oxford and Cambridge,
the central administration is attaining more influ-
ence — the vice chancellorship can no longer be
rotated casually among the masters. The vice chan-
cellor now must deal with the university grants
committee and the vice chancellors of the other
universities. The university itself is a much more
important unit with its research laboratories, central
library, its lecturers in specialized subjects; the col-
lege is much less self-contained than it was. All of
this has created something of a crisis in the adminis-
tration of Oxford and Cambridge where adminis-
trators once were not to be seen or heard and the
work was accomplished by a handful of clerks work-
ing in a Dickensian office. Oxbridge is becoming
more like the Rcdbricks. London is sui generis.

The general rule is that the administration every-
where becomes, by force of circumstances if not by
choice, a more prominent feature of the university.
As the institution becomes larger, administration
becomes more formalized and separated as a distinct
function; as the institution becomes more complex,
the role of administration becomes more central in
integrating it; as it becomes more related to the once
eternal world, the administration assumes the bur-

ens of these relationships. The managerial revolu-
tion has been going on also in the university.

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

29

MULTIVERSITY PRESIDENT, GIANT
OR MEDIATOR-INITIATOR?

It is sometimes said that the American multi-
versity president is a two-faced character. This is not
so. If he were, he could not survive. He is a many-
faced character, in the sense that he must face in
many directions at once while contriving to turn his
back on no important group. In this he is different in
degree from his counterparts of rectors and vice
chancellors, since they face in fewer directions
because their institutions have fewer doors and
windows to the outside world. The difference,
however, is not one of kind. And intensities of
relationships vary greatly; the rector of a Latin
American university, from this point of view, may
well have the most trying task of all, though he is less
intertwined in a range of relationships than the
North American university president.

The university president in the United States is
expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague
of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound
administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with
the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations
and the federal agencies, a politician with the state
legislature, a friend of industry, labor, and agricul-
ture, a persuasive diplomat with donors, a champion
of education generally, a supporter of the profes-

30

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

sions (particularly law and medicine), a spokesman
to the press, a scholar in his own right, a public
servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of
opera and football equally, a decent human being,
a good husband and father, an active member of a
church. Above all he must enjoy traveling in air-
planes, eating his meals in public, and attending
public ceremonies. No one can be all of these things.
Some succeed at being none.

He should be firm, yet gentle; sensitive to others,
insensitive to himself; look to the past and the
future, yet be firmly planted in the present; both
visionary and sound; affable, yet reflective; know the
value of a dollar and realize that ideas cannot be
bought; inspiring in his visions yet cautious in what
he does; a man of principle yet able to make a deal;
a man with broad perspective who will follow the
details conscientiously; a good American but ready
to criticize the status quo fearlessly; a seeker of truth
where the truth may not hurt too much; a source of
public policy pronouncements when they do not
reflect on his own institution. He should sound like
a mouse at home and look like a lion abroad. He is
one of the marginal men in a democratic society —
of whom there are many others — on the margin of
many groups, many ideas, many endeavors, many
characteristics. He is a marginal man but at the
very center of the total process.

Who is he really?

To Flexner, he was a hero-figure, “a daring pio-

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 3 1

neer” who filled an “impossible post” yet some of his
accomplishments were “little short of miraculous”, •
thus the “forceful president” — the Gilman, the Eliot,
the Harper. The necessary revolutions came from on
high. There should be Giants in the Groves. To
Thorstein Veblen he was a “Captain of Erudi-
tion,’”'* and Veblen did not think well of captains.
To Upton Sinclair, the university president was “the
most universal faker and most variegated prevari-
cator that has yet appeared in the civilized world.’”®
To the faculty, he is usually not a hero-figure.
Hutchins observed that the faculty really “prefer
anarchy to any form of government’”® — particu-
larly the presidential form.

The issue is whether the president should be
“leader” or “officeholder,” as Hutchins phrased it;
“educator” or “caretaker,” as Harold W. Dodds'^
stated it; “creator” or “inheritor,” as Frederick
Rudolph'® saw it; “initiator” as viewed by James L.
Morrill'® or consensus-seeker as viewed by John D.
Millett;®® the wielder of power or the persuader, as
visualized by Henry M. Wriston;®' “pump or
“bottleneck” as categorized by Eric Ashby.^®

The case for leadership has been strongly put by
Hutchins. A university needs a purpose, “a vision of
the end.” If it is to have a “vision,” the president
must identify it; and, without vision, there is aim-
lessness” and the “vast chaos of the American
university.” “The administrator must accept a spe-
cial responsibility for the discussion, clarification.

32

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

definition and proclamation of this end.” He must
be a “troublemaker, for every change in education
is a change in the habits of some members of the
faculty.” For all this he needs the great “moral
virtues” of “courage,” “fortitude,” “justice,” and
“prudence.” In looking for administrators who
really thought and wrote about the “end” of their
institution, Hutchins particularly identified Marcus
Aurelius as the great prototype.^^ Lowell, too,
believed a president should have a “plan” and that
although the faculty was “entitled to propose
changes,” the plan should not basically be subject to
interference. He also had the rather quaint idea that
the president should “never feel hurried” or “work
. , . under pressure.”^'*

There were such leaders in higher education.
Hutchins was one. Lowell was another; and so was
Eliot. When Eliot was asked by a faculty member of
the medical school how it could be after eighty years
of managing its own affairs the faculty had to
accommodate to so many changes, he could answer,
“There is a new president.”^^ Even in Oxford, of aU
places, as it belatedly adapted to the new world of
scholarship, Benjamin Jowett as Master of Balliol
could set as his rule: “Never retract, never explain.
Get it done and let them howI.”^° Lord Bryce could
comment in his American Commonwealth on the great
authority of the president in the American univer-
sity, on his “almost monarchical position.”^’

But the day of the monarchs has passed — ^the day

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

33

when Benjamin Ide Wheeler could ride his white
horse across the Berkeley campus or Nicholas
Murray Butler rule from Morningside Heights.
Flexner rather sadly recorded that “the day of the
excessively autocratic president is . . . over. He has
done a great service , . Paul Lazarsfeld could
observe the “academic power vacuum” that resulted
— leadership no longer taken by the president nor
assumed by the faculty, with the result of little
“institutional development.”"® Hutchins was the last
of the giants in the sense that he was the last of the
university presidents who really tried to change his
institution and higher education in any fundamental
way. Instead of the not always so agreeable autoc-
racy, there is now the usually benevolent bureauc-
racy, as in so much of the rest of the world. Instead
of the Captain of Erudition or even David Riesman’s
“staff sergeant,” there is the Captain of the Bu-
reaucracy who is sometimes a galley slave on his own
ship; and “no great revolutionary figure is likely to
appear.”-®

The role of giant was never a happy one. Hutchins
concluded that the administrator has many ways
to lose, and no way to win, and came to acknowl-
edge that patience, \vhich he once called a de-
lusion and a snare,” was also a virtue. “It is one
thing to get things done. It is another to make them
last.” The experience of Tappan at Michigan was
typical of many, as Angell later saw it; ‘ Tappan
was the largest figure of a man that ever appeared

34

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

on the Michigan campus. And he was stung to
death by gnats,”^°

The giant was seldom popular with the faculty
and was often bitterly opposed, as in the “revolu-
tion” against Wheeler at California, And faculty
govermnent gained strength as faculties gained
distinction. The experiences of Tappan, Wheeler,
Hutchins, even Thomas Jefferson, are part of the
lore of the tmiversity presidency. So are those of
Wayland, who resigned from Brown in fiustration
after vainly trying something new, Woodrow Wilson
with all his battles over innovations at Princeton,
and many others.

Moreover the university has changed; it has
become bigger and more complex, more tensed with
checks and balances. As Rudolph saw it, there came
to be “a delicate balance of interests, a polite tug of
war, a blending of emphases.” The presidency was
“an office fraught with so many perils, shot through
with so many ambiguities, an office that was many
things to many men.”®’ There are more elements to
conciliate, fewer in a position to be led. The univer-
sity has become the multiversity and the nature of
the presidency has followed this change.

Also, the times have changed. The giants were
innovators during a wave of innovation, to use the
terms of Joseph Schumpeter drawn from another
context. The American university required vast
renovation to meet the needs of the changing and
growing nation. As Eliot said in his inaugural

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

35

address, “The University must accommodate itself
promptly to significant changes in the character of
the people for whom it exists.” The title of Wilson’s
inaugural address was, “Princeton for the Nation’s
Service.” They and Others helped take what had
been denominational colleges and turn them into
modern national universities. They were not in-
ventors — the Germans did the inventing — but they
came along at a stage in history when massive
innovation was the order of the day. The giants
today, when found at all, are more likely to be in a
few of the old Latin American universities under-
going modernization or the new British universities
in the midst of an intense discussion of educational
policy.

The giants had performed “a great service,” but
gentler hands were needed. University adminis-
tration reverted to the more standard British model
of “government by consent and after consultation.”^-
There is a “kind of lawlessness”^® in any large
university with many separate sources of initiative
and power; and the task is to keep this lawlessness
within reasonable bounds. The president must seek
“consensus” in a situation where there is a “struggle
for power” among groups that share it.®'' “The
president must use power economically, and per-
suasion to the fullest extent.”®® As Allan Nevins sees
it, “The sharpest strain on growth lies not in finding
the teachers, but expert administrators,” and tiie
new type of president required by the large univer-

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

36

sities “will be a coordinator rather than a creative
leader ... an expert executive, a tactful mod-
erator. . . .”^®

Academic government has taken the form of the
Guild, as in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge
until recent times; of the Manor, as in Columbia
under Butler; and of the United Nations, as in the
modem multiversity. There are several “nations” of
students, of faculty, of alumni, of trustees, of public
groups. Each has its territory, its jurisdiction, its
form of government. Each can declare war on the
others; some have the power of veto. Each can settle
its own problems by a majority vote, but altogether
they form no single constituency. It is a pluralistic
society with multiple cultures. Coexistence is more
likely than unity. Peace is one priority item, progress
another.

The president in the multiversity is leader, edu-
cator, creator, initiator, wielder of power, pump; he
is also officeholder, caretaker, inheritor, consensus-
seeker, persuader, bottleneck. But he is mostly a
mediator.

The first task of the mediator is peace — how he
may “the Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute.”
Peace within the student body, the faculty, the
tmstees; and peace between and among them. Peace
between the “Two Cultures” and the “Three
Cultvu'es” and their subcultures; among all the ideas
competing for support. Peace between the internal
environment of the academic community and the

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY

37

external society that surrounds and sometimes al-
most engulfs it. But peace has its attributes. There is
the “workable compromise” of the day that resolves
the current problem. Beyond this lies the effective
solution that enhances the long-run distinction and
character of the institution. In seeking it, there are
some things that should not be compromised, like
freedom and quality — then the mediator needs to
become the gladiator. The dividing lines between
these two roles may not be as clear as crystal, but
they are at least as fragile.

The second task is progress; institutional and
personal survival are not enough. A multiversity is
inherently a conservative institution but with rad-
ical functions. There are so many groups with a
legitimate interest in the status quo, so many veto
groups; yet the university must serve a knowledge
explosion and a population explosion simultane-
ously. The president becomes the central mediator
among the values of the past, the prospects for the
future, and the realities of the present. He is the
mediator among groups and institutions moving at
different rates of speed and sometimes in different
directions; a carrier of change — as infectious and
sometimes as feared as a “Typhoid Mary.” He is not
an innovator for the sake of innovation, but he must
be sensitive to the fruitful innovation. He has no new
and bold “vision of the end.” He is driven more by
necessity than by voices in the air. “Innovation”
may be the historical “measurement of success,” the

38

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

great characterizing feature of the “giants of the
past”;^" but innovations sometimes succeed best
when they have no obvious author. Lowell once
observed that a president “cannot both do things
and get credit for them” — that he should not “cackle
like a hen that laid an egg.”

The ends are already given — the preservation of
the eternal truths, the creation of new knowledge,
the improvement of service wherever truth and
knowledge of high order may serve the needs of
man. The ends are there; the means must be ever
improved in a competitive dynamic environment.
There is no single “end” to be discovered; there are
several ends and many groups to be served.

The quality of the mediation is subject to judg-
ment on two grounds, the keeping of the peace and
the furthering of progress — the resolution of inter-
personal and inter-group warfare, and the recon-
ciliation of the tug of the anchor to the past with
the pull of the Holy Grail of the future. Unfortu-
nately peace and progress are more frequently
enemies than friends; and since, in the long run,
progress is more important than peace to a univer-
sity, the effective mediator must, at times, sacrifice
peace to progress. The ultimate test is whether the
mediation permits progress to be made fast enough
and in the right directions, whether the needed in-
novations take precedence over the conservatism
of the institution. Mediators, though less dramatic

THE roEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 39

than giants, are not a homogenized group; they
only look that way.

They also appear to some people to be doing very
little of consequence. Yet their role is absolutely
essential if carried out constructively. They serve
something of the function of the clerk of the meeting
for the Quakers — the person who keeps the busi-
ness moving, draws forth ideas, seeks the “sense of
the meeting.” David Riesman has suggested the
term “evocator.” The techniques must be those of
the mediator; but to the techniques may also be
added the goals of the innovator. The essence of the
role, when adequately performed, is perhaps best
conveyed by the term “mediator-initiator.”

Power is not necessary to the task, though there
must be a consciousness of power. The president
must police its use by the constituent groups, so that
none wll have too much or too little or use it too
unwdsely. To make the multiversity work really
effectively, the moderates need to be in control of
each power center and there needs to be an attitude
of tolerance between and among the power centers,
with few territorial ambitions. When the extremists
get in control of the students, the faculty, or the
trustees with class warfare concepts, then the “deli-
cate balance of interests” becomes an actual war.

The usual axiom is that power should be com-
mensurate with responsibility, but, for the president,
the opportunity to persuade should be commensurate

40

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

with the responsibility. He must have ready access
to each center of power, a fair chance in each forum
of opinion, a chance to paint reality in place of illu-
sion and to argue the cause of reason as he sees it.

Not all presidents seek to be constructive media-
tors amid their complexities. One famous president
of a New York university succeeded in being at home
only five months in five years. Some find it more
pleasant to attend meetings, visit projects abroad,
even give lectures at other universities; and at home
they attend ceremonial functions, go to the local
clubs, and allow the winds of controversy to swirl
past them. Others look for “visions.” But most presi-
dents are in the control tower helping the real pilots
make their landings without crashes, even in the fog.

Hutchins wrote of the four moral virtues for a
university president. I should like to suggest a
slightly different three — judgment, courage, and
fortitude — but the greatest of these is fortitude since
others have so little charity. The mediator, whether
in government or industry or labor relations or
domestic quarrels, is always subject to some abuse.
He wins few clear-cut victories; he must aim more
at avoiding the worst than seizing the best. He must
find satisfaction in being equally distasteful to each
of his constituencies; he must reconcile himself to
the harsh reality that successes are shrouded in
lienee while failures are spotlighted in notoriety.

e president of the multiversity must be content
to hold its constituent elements loosely together and

THE IDEA OF A MULTU^RSITY 4I

to move the whole enterprise another foot ahead
in what often seems an unequal race with history.

LIFE IN THE MULTIVERSITY

The “Idea of a University” was a village with its
priests. The “Idea of a Modern University” was a
town — a one-industiy' town — with its intellectual
oligarchy. “The Idea of a Multiversity” is a city
of infinite variety. Some get lost in the city; some
rise to die top widiin it; most fashion their lives
within one of its many subcultures. There is less
sense of community than in the village but also less
sense of confinement. There is less sense of purpose
than within the town but there are more ways to
excel. There are also more refuges of anonymity —
both for the creative person and the drifter. As
against the village and the town, the “city” is more
like the totality of civilization as it has evolved and
more an integral part of it; and movement to and
from the surrounding society has been greatly ac-
celerated. As in a city, there are many separate en-
deavors under a single rule of law.

The students in the “city” are older, more likely
to be married, more vocationally oriented, more
drawn from all classes and races than the students
in the village;^® and they find themselves in a most
intensely competitive atmosphere. They identify
less with the total community and more ivith its
subgroups. Burton R. Clark and Martin Trow have

42 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

a particularly interesting typology of these subcul-
tures; the “collegiate” of the fraternities and sorori-
ties and the athletes and activities majors; the
“academic” of the serious students; the “vocational”
of the students seeking training for specific jobs; and
the “nonconformist” of the political activists, the
aggressive intellectuals, and the bohemians.^® These
subcultures are not mutually exclusive, and some of
the fascinating pageantry of the multiversity is found
in their interaction one on another.

The multiversity is a confusing place for the stu-
dent. He has problems of establishing his identity
and sense of security within it. But it offers him a
vast range of choices, enough literally to stagger the
mind. In this range of choices he encounters the
opportunities and the dilermnas of freedom. The
casualty rate is high. The walking wounded are
many, Lernfreiheil — the fi-eedom of the student to
pick and choose, to stay or to move on — is trium-
phant.

Life has changed also for the faculty member.
The multiversity is in the main stream of events.
To the teacher and the researcher have been added
the consultant and the administrator. Teaching is
less central than it once was for most faculty mem-
bers; research has become more important. This
has given rise to what has been called the “non-
teacher” — “the higher a man’s standing, the less
he has to do with students” — and to a threefold

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 43

class Structure of what used to be “the faculty”:
those who only do research, those who only teach
(and they are largely in an auxiliary role), and
those who still do some of both. In one university I
know, the proportions at the Ph.D. level or its
equivalent are roughly one researcher to two teach-
ers to four who do both.

Consulting work and other sources of additional
income have given rise to what is called the “affluent
professor,” a category that does include some but
by no means all of the faculty. Additionally, many
faculty members, with their research assistants and
teaching assistants, their departments and institutes,
have become administrators. A professor’s life has
become, it is said, “a rat race of business and ac-
tivity, managing contracts and projects, guiding
teams and assistants, bossing crews of technicians,
making numerous trips, sitting on committees for
government agencies, and engaging in other distrac-
tions necessary to keep the whole frenetic business
from collapse.” ■**

The intellectual world has been fractionalized
as interests have become much more diverse; and
there are fewer common topics of conversation at
the faculty clubs. Faculty government has become
more cumbersome, more the avocation of active
minorities; and there are real questions whether it
can work effectively on a large scale, whether it can
agree on more than preservation of the status quo.

44

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

Faculty members are less members of the particular
university and more colleagues within their national
academic discipline groups.

But there are many compensations. “The Ameri-
can professoriate” is no longer, as Flexner once
called it, “a proletariat.” Salaries and status have
risen considerably. The faculty member is more
a fully participating member of society, rather than
a creature on the periphery; some are at the very
center of national and world events. Research op-
portunities have been enormously increased. The
faculty member within the big mechanism and wth
all his opportunities has a new sense of independence
from the domination of the administration or his
colleagues; much administration has been effec-
tively decentralized to the level of the individual
professor. In particular, he has a choice of roles and
mixtures of roles to suit his taste as never before.
He need not leave the Groves for the Acropolis un-
less he wishes; but he can, if he wishes. He may even
become, as some have, essentially a professional
man with his home office and basic retainer on the
campus of the multiversity but with his clients
scattered from coast to coast. He can also even re-
main the professor of old, as many do. There are
several patterns of life from which to choose. So
the professor too has greater freedom. Lehrfreiheil,
in the old German sense of the freedom of the pro-
fessor to do as he pleases, also is triumphant.

What is the justification of the modem American

THE IDEA OF A MULTIVERSITY 45

multiversity? History is one answer. Consistency
with the surrounding society is another. Beyond
that, it has few peers in tlic presentation and dis-
semination and c.\’amination of the eternal truths;
no liHng peers in the search for new knowledge;
and no peers in all history among institutions of
higher learning in semng so many of the segments
of an advancing civilization. Inconsistent internally
as an institution, it is consistently productive. Torn
by change, it has the stability of freedom. Though
it has not a single soul to call its own, its members
pay their devotions to truth.

The multiversity in America is perhaps best seen
at work, adapting and growing, as it responded to
the massive impact of federal progivams beginning
with World War II. A vast transformation has
taken place without a revolution, for a time almost
ivithout notice being taken. The multiversity has
demonstrated how adaptive it can be to new op-
portunities for creativity; how responsive to money;
how eagerly it can play a new and useful role; how
fast it can change while pretending that nothing
has happened at all; how fast it can neglect some
of its ancient virtues. What are the current realities
of the federal grant university?

48

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

gave academic respectability and content to the
“land grant” idea; and Harvard, a private univer-
sity with a long academic tradition, could travel
much the same path of development as Cornell, a
newly established land grant institution. German
intellectualism and American populism were
merged in the new university. Pure intellect and
raw pragmatism made an unlikely but successful
alliance.

The second great impact on the universities began
with federal support of scientific research during
World War 11. The wartime laboratories that were
the forerunners of such continuing government-
financed research centers as the Lincoln Laboratory
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the
Argonne at Chicago, and the Lawrence Radiation
Laboratory at California, opened a new age. The
major universities were enlisted in national defense
and in scientific and technological development as
never before. (In World War I the universities had
only been a source of raw recruits.)

Instead of Gilman, Eliot, and White, there were
now such new pioneers as Conant, Compton, and
ush to guide this alliance of the federal government
with the universities. Don K. Price notes that “in

1 Bush, James B. Conant, and

r . ompton the government contract became
a new type of federalism.”^ In addition to the in-
ustna revolution there was now the scientific
evo ution to be served. In addition to the stimulus

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

49

of Germany, tliere was Russia — for Russian sci-
entific achievements both before and after Sputnik
were an immense spur to the new departure. Amer-
ican universities have been changed almost as much
by the federal research grant as by the land grant
idea.

It is interesting that American universities, which
pride themselves on their autonomy, should have
taken their special character as much or more from
the pressures of their environment as from tlieir
own inner desires; tliat institutions which identify
themselves either as “private” or as “state” should
have found their greatest stimulus in federal initia-
tive; that universities which are part of a highly
decentralized and varied system of higher education
should, nevertheless, have responded witli such
fidelity and alacrity to national needs; that institu-
tions which had their historical origins in the train-
ing of “gentlemen” should have committed them-
selves so fully to the service of brute technology.

The “federal grant” university has been emerging
over the past twenty years, but until recently it has
developed more by force of circumstances than by
conscious design. The universities most affected have
been making largely piecemeal adjustments to the
new phenomena without any great effort at an over-
all view of what has been happening to them. Per-
haps this was just as well — the transition probably
was smoother precisely because it was not subjected
to critical analysis. The federal government and the

50 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

leading universities entered into a common-law
marriage unblessed by predetermined policies and
self-surveys — but nonetheless they formed a very
productive union.

All this, however, as was inevitable, is being
changed. Harvard has now studied itself. So has
Princeton. Brookings and Carnegie have studied
us all; so have the Department of Health, Educa-
tion, and Welfare; the President’s Science Advisory
Committee; the American Council on Education;
and the American Assembly.^ Tlie principal con-
clusion was predictable: the federal colossus had
the power to influence the most ruggedly individual
of universities. A paradox emerged: the better and
the more individual the university, the greater its
chancra of succumbing to the federal embrace.
Washington did not waste its money on the second-
rate.

Soon there will be a national policy as well as
nationwide activity, and I am at least a little con-
cerned. All these studies have identified problems
that we knew all along to exist. But now that we
have publicly identified the problems, we shall be
expected to deal with them; and in dealing with
them we shall create new problems. Mostly, we
shall have to strive for “balance” in a number of
different ways. We shall have to “balance” the
wishes of individual scholars tvith those of their
institutions; New England wth the South; the sci-
ences with the humanities; research %vith teaching;

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 5 1

graduate training with undergraduate education;
merit with politics; the judgment of specialists with
general formulae. And yet one of the more produc-
tive aspects of federal involvement to date has been
its imbalance.

We are clearly entering the second phase of the
“federal grant” development. The first I shall iden-
tify as tlie phase of “intuitive imbalance,” and the
new phase just emerging as one of “bureaucratic
balance.” It is a good time to examine where we
have been and where we may be going. We are in
the midst of a vast transformation of university life
and none of us can be too sure where we really are
going; but we can try to peer aliead.

As a basis for discussing the two phases of federal
grant development, I shall briefly review die essen-
dal facts about federal involvement with univer-
sities in this country.

^ Federal interest in higher education dates from
1787. That year saw the beginning of endowment
of public institutions of higher education with public
lands, following the example of the Northwest
Ordinance of 1785, which provided land to sup-
port public schools at the lower levels. However,
this interest was not made effective until the Morrill
Land Grant Act of 1862. Tlien the Second Morrill
Act in 1890 supplemented the original land grants
with federal grants of funds to support college in-
struction in specified subjects; these grants still con-
tinue, and, in fact, have recently been expanded.

52

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

Federal interest in higher education was further
made effective by the Hatch Act in 1887, establish-
ing the Agricultural Experiment Stations, and by
the Smith-Lever Act in 1914, creating the Agricul-
tural Extension Service. During World War I, the
ROTC program was established. During the Great
Depression, universities were involved in the pro-
grams of the Work Projects Administration and
National Youth Administration. During World
War II, universities participated heavily in the
Engineering, Science and Management War Train-
ing Program inaugurated in 1940. In that same
year, the National Defense Research Committee
(later the Office of Scientific Research and Develop-
ment) was established, and leading universities be-
came engaged in the veirious programs of war re-
search which it set up.

After World War II and again after the Korean
conflict, the “G.I. Bill” and ffie corresponding bill
for Korean veterans sent a seismic shock through
academic life.

Despite this long history of federal interest, how-
ever, it is evident that with the exception of the
comparatively restricted areas of agriculture and
military training, there was no continuing federal
involvement wth higher education xmtil World
War II.

H Currently, federal support has become a major
factor in the total performance of many universities,
and the sums involved are substantial. Higher edu-

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

53

cation in i960 received about Si. 5 billion from the
federal government — a hundredfold increase in
twenty years. About one third of this Si. 5 billion
was for university-affiliated research centers; about
one third for project research within universities;
and about one third for other things, such as resi-
dence hall loans, scholarships, and teaching pro-
grams. This last third was expended at colleges as
well as universities, but the first two thirds almost
exclusively at universities, and at relatively few of
them.

The $i billion for research, though only 10 per-
cent of total federal support for research and devel-
opment, accounted for 75 percent of all university
expenditures on research and 15 percent of total
university budgets. Clearly the shape and nature
of university research are profoundly affected by
federal monies.

^Federal research funds to universities flow
primarily from six agencies. In 1961 the percentage
distribution was as follows:

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare . . 39
(37 percent was from National Institutes of Health alone)

Department of Defense 32

National Science Foundation u

Atomic Energy Commission 8

Department of Agriculture 8

National Aeronautics and Space

Administration 3

Other agencies ^

54 the uses of the university

(These figures do not include funds for university-
operated government research centers.)

This federal support has been almost exclusively
identified with three great and somewhat inter-
related national concerns: defense (40 percent of
the total in 1961, including support by the Depart-
ment of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion); scientific and technological progress (20 per-
cent — National Science Foundation, Department of
Agriculture, and NASA); and health (37 percent —
through the National Institutes of Health). Federal
support has not been directed explicitly toward
strengthening universities generally, or one or more
universities specifically, in any over-all fashion — as
might be said of the University Grants Committee
in Great Britain.

^ Federal research expenditures have been largely
restricted to the physical and biomedical sciences,
and engineering, with only about 3 percent for the
social sciences and hardly any support for the
humanities.

^ Among the totality of university functions, fed-
eral support has been heavily concentrated on re-
search and on graduate and postdoctoral training
in fields of national interest.

^ The preferred approach of the federal govern-
ment to the use of university facilities for research
has been (a) the specialized research center — by
1963 there were fourteen major ones,® and (b) the
research project. Projects have been supported for

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

55

relatively short terms and specific purposes; and
support has been awarded, usually on tlie advice
of qualified experts, on the basis of prospective per-
formance.

^ Federal research expenditures have been heavily
focused on a relatively fe^v institutions. If both
project research and large research centers are in-
cluded, six universities received 57 percent of tlie
funds in a recent fiscal year, and Uventy universities
received 79 percent. If project research alone is con-
sidered, the figures are 28 and 54 percent. As a
percentage of total university expenditures for all
purposes among the leading t\venty recipients, fed-
eral funds have amounted to 20 to 50 percent when
project research alone is counted and from 20 to
over 80 percent when the research centcis are added.
These twenty universities are only about one tenth
of all universities in tlic United States. They consti-
tute the primary federal grant univci'sitics.

Recently there has been some spreading out of
federal interest from the physical and biomc'dieal
to the social sciences; from graduate to undergradu-
ate training; from a selective few to an expancUtl
number of universities.

PHASE one: INTUITIVE IMUALANta^

For about twenty years now, (Iongr<'s.s has Inaai
deciding in which general areas the parlnershi)'
between the federal government and the universitus

56

THE USES OF THE UNIVEKSTTY

should be developed. The areas chosen have been
defense, scientific and technological progress, and
health. Decisions have not been based on thorough
study of national priorities. They have been made
pragmatically, in response to the felt needs of the
nation and of the people in accord wth the possi-
bilities of the times, and also, to an extent, in re-
sponse to the urgings of very powerful lobbies. The
atom was split, and could be used for war and peace.
The “cold war” followed World War 11 and neces-
sitated further defense work. Health became a mat-
ter of great national concern. Possibilities for space
exploration developed. Congress reacted quickly
to each of these realities.

Once Congress initiated a program, federal ad-
ministrative officers turned to those universities best
able to give immediate and effective assistance on
the individual programs; or rather they turned to
those scientists in the best position to respond
quickly and efficiently — and those scientists w'ere
principally located in a limited number of institu-
tions. These actions were not undertaken on the
basis of any general review of institutional capacity
or poteritial capacity, but on quick and ready api-
prehension of possibilities and respxmse to them.
The test was who could most effectively do the job

at hand. The process was more intuitive than
studied.

For about twenty' years, universities have been
accepting the research centers and projects as pro-

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

57

posed by faculty members and government agencies,
making such day-to-day adjustments as were needed
and possible. In consequence, these universities have
been profoundly affected. The whole process has
been one of starting new endeavors, and this has
changed the pre-existing “balance” in several ways.
Some real and some not so real issues have arisen
for the universities.

I. Federal control and federal influence. Federal con-
trol as a substantive issue is, as Sidney Hook has
said, a “red herring.”^ With a few exceptions — the
generally necessary exception of secrecy in certain
types of work and the unnecessary exception of the
disclaimer affidavit required by the National De-
fense Education Act — there has been no control in
any deleterious sense. By way of contrast, state con-
trol of state universities has been a real problem.®
The federal government has customarily put sci-
entifically trained persons in charge of science pro-
grams and they have operated fully within academic
traditions.

The real problem is not one of federal control but
of federal influence. A federal agency offers a project.

A university need not accept — but, as a practical
matter, it usually does. One of the quickest ways to
lose a faculty member is by refusing to accept the
grant he has just negotiated with his counterpart in
Washington. Out of this reality have followed many
of the consequences of federal aid for the universi-
ties; and they have been substantial. That they are

58

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

subtle, slowly cumulative and gentlemanly makes
them all the more potent.

2. University control and the agency as alma mater. A
university’s control over its own destiny has been
substantially reduced. University funds from tuition
and fees, gifts and endowments, and state sources
go through the usual budget-making procedures
and their assignment is subject to review in accord-
ance with internal policy. Federal research funds,
however, are usually negotiated by the individual
scholar with the particular agency, and so bypass
the usual review process. Thus 20 to 50 to 80 per-
cent of a university’s expenditures may be handled
outside the normal channels. These fiinds in turn
commit some of the university’s own funds; they
influence the assignment of space; they determine
the distribution of time between teaching and re-
search; to a large extent they establish the areas in
which the university grows the fastest. Almost im-
perceptibly, a university is changed.

The authority of the department chairman, the
dean, the president are thereby reduced; so also is
the role of faculty government. This may have its
advantages. Scholars seem to prefer dealing with
their professional counterparts in Washington rather
than with their colleagues and administrators at
lome. Also the university’s internal process of dis-
Iri uling funds would be generally less selective
and less flexible than the federal research project
approach. Within a university, the tendency is to

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

59

give eacli faculty member about tlie same opportu-
nity and once having given it to keep giving it tliere-
after; but the project metliod allows more attention
to exceptional merit and has the advantage that
all projects may end some time. Additionally, fed-
eral agencies are more responsive to particular na-
tional needs than the universities would be, given
the same amount of money to spend according to
tlieir own priority system.

There are, however, clearly detrimental effects.
Some faculty members come to use the pressure of
their agency contacts against their university. They
may try to force the establishment of a new adminis-
trative unit or the assignment of land for their own
special building, in defiance of general university
policy or priorities. These pressures, of course,
should be withstood; they speak well neither of the
professor nor of the agency. Also, some faculty
members tend to shift their identification and loyalty
from their university to the agency in Washington.
Their concern with the general welfare of the
university is eroded and they become tenants rather
than owmers, taking their grants with them as they
change their institutional lodgings. The university,
us Allen Wallis, president of the University of
Rochester, has remarked, becomes to an extent a
hotel.” The agency becomes the new alma mater.
The research entrepreneur becomes a euphoric
schizophrenic.

It has been said that, in the face of federal aid,

6o

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

university presidents have “abdicated” their respon-
sibilities for the general conduct of their institutions.
I would put it differently — they have let some things
go by that they would have liked to do differently;
but this is often what they do anyway. There are,
however, especially acute problems when the agency
insists on the tie-in sale (if we do this for you, then
you must do that for us) or when it requires frequent
and detailed progress reports. Then the university
really is less than a free agent. It all becomes a kind
of “putting-out” system with the agency taking the
place of the merchant-capitalist of old. Sweat shops
have developed out of such a system in earlier times
and in other industries.

3. ‘^Scientists Affluent, Humanists Militant.’^ Federal
research support has added a new dimension to the
eternal class struggles within a university. To
student versus faculty, assistant versus tenure pro-
fessors, and faculty versus administrators has been
added a new hierarchical point of tension — that
between humanists and scientists. The scientists, by
and large, in the federal grant universities, get
promoted faster, get more space, get more income
through summer employment and consulting, have
more secretaries and assistants, have greater access
to travel funds and expense accounts, and accumu-
late a greater sense of status within and outside the
academic community. Some humanists obviously
resent all this and consider it quite unfair, even

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

6l

though their own situation has improved, relative to
what it used to be.

However, there is still another side to the story.
The scientist who gets a series of projects going can
become caught in his own apparatus. Graduate
students and staff members become dependent upon
him. He is committed to project deadlines and
periodic contract negotiations. He is enmeshed in a
web of obligations and it is very hard to break out.
As a result, he often works hard at things he would
rather not do — more often than need be true of the
humanist.

There is some current tendency for the brightest
of graduate students to prefer the sciences to the
social sciences and the humanities,® and this will
have an impact on comparative faculty quality as
between fields of study in tlie years to come. How
much of this has been caused by federal aid and how
much by the current liveliness of the different fields
is not at all clear. My own impression is that the
brightest graduate students flock to the areas with
the brightest new ideas, regardless of federal aid.

All this is said to have destroyed the “balance’
among fields and it is generally concluded that
something should be done about it. The balance
among fields, however, has never been a static thing.
If it were, philosophy, theology, and the classics
would still be the dominant areas of study, as they
have not been for a long time. Assuming that the

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

63

world some of the power and affluence of their
professions in the outside world. These are stated as
matters of fact, not as ideal situations.

Generally, I think, it is remarkable and com-
mendable that so high a degree of internal equity
has thus far been preserved within the academic
world in the face of quite chaotic pressures imping-
ing upon it,

4. The ineviiability of concentration. The project
approach almost automatically led to concentration
of federal research effort in a relatively few univer-
sities. The universities best equipped to undertake
the research were also those with the faculty and
facilities to provide for the training of Ph.D.’s. It is
no coincidence that the six universities with a little
more than 25 percent of project funds graduated
about 25 percent of the Ph.D.’s; and a similar
situation prevails for the top twenty universities. If
“only the best will do,”® this concentration of effort
is inevitable. A. different result would have been
quite surprising.

This concentration of effort has undoubtedly
strengthened the facilities and improved the quality
of faculties of universities already in the front rank.

It has probably widened the gap between those of
the first and those of the second and third ranks. It
may, in fact, have actually injured universities of the
second and third ranks and some colleges by turning
their potential faculty members into research per-
sonnel in the front-rank universities. The good are

64

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

better; the poor may well be worse. And it has
greatly accentuated the differences between colleges
and universities.

5. Teaching the graduates versus teaching the under-
graduates. The much-advertised conflict between
teaching and research puts the problem the wrong
way. The teaching of graduate students is so closely
tied to research that if research is improved, gradu-
ate instruction is almost bound to be improved also.
And the almost universal experience seems to be
that federal research support has improved graduate
instruction. There have been better facilities, more
research assistantships and fellowships, more re-
search projects in which students can work directly
with faculty members — ^all resulting from federal
funds. At the graduate level, there has been a clear
gain, and fortunately so, because graduate enroll-
ments at the federal grant universities have been
increasing rapidly.

At the undergraduate level, however, the “subtle
discounting of the teaching process”^® has been
aided and abetted. Harold Orlans, who conducted
the excellent Brookings study of federal aid to
universities, concludes that federal research aid “has
accelerated the long-standing depreciation of under-
graduate education at large universities.”” This is
my own observation, with one exception — that a
very few private institutions with long traditions of
very high-quality undergraduate instruction have

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 65

been able to maintain tlieir standards; and this is
to their great credit.

The reasons for the general deterioration of
undergraduate teaching are several. Teaching loads
and student contact hours have been reduced.
Faculty members arc more frequently on leave or
temporarily away from the campus; some are never
more than temporarily on campus. More of the
instiuction falls to teachers who arc not members of
the regular faculty. The best graduate students
prefer fellowships and research assistantships to
teaching assistantships. Postdoctoral fellows who
might fill die gap usually do not teach. Average
class size has been increasing.

There seems to be a “point of no return” after
which research, consulting, graduate instruction
become so absorbing that faculty efforts can no
longer be concentrated on undergraduate instruc-
tion as they once were. This process has been going
on for a long time; federal research funds have
intensified it. As a consequence, undergraduate
education in the large university is more likely to be
acceptable than outstanding; educational policy
from the undergraduate point of view is largely
neglected. How to escape the cruel paradox that a
superior faculty results in an inferior concern for
undergraduate teaching is one of our more pressing
problems.

6. The facility and the vn-faailly. University scholars

68

THE USES OF THE UXI\^RSITY

funds. Some abuses have inevitably developed.
Funds have been diverted at times from one use to
another — and the" other a use not intended by the
federal agency. Some faculty members make in-
formal alliances — if you consult on my project, then
I should consult on yours — and total income has
been pyramided through this exchange of consult-
ancies to occasionally astounding levels. When these
same faculty members sit on the federal panels that
make the grants, the whole process becomes quite
involved, to say the least. Excessive amounts of
expensive equipment have at times been purchased,
and equipment salesmen chase grants around. Some
universities promise not only a base salary' but
substantial supplemental personal income and al-
lowances from federal grants as a recruiting device
in a wilder and ^^’ilder upward spiral.

There have been some scandals. There wll be
more. The federal agencies will exercise increasingly
specific controls and the universities dependent on
this new standard of living will accept these controls.
The universities themselves will have to exercise
more stringent controls by centralizing authority,
particularly through the audit process. In a fetv
situations, self-restraint has not been enough re-
straint; as one result, greater c.xfernal restraint %vill
be imposed in most situations.

With all its problems, however, federal research
aid to universities has helped gready in meeting
national needs. It has greatly assisted the universities

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 69

themselves. The nation is stronger. The leading
universities are stronger. As Nathan Pusey reported
the unanimous views of the presidents of universities
participating in the Carnegie study, federal aid,
over all, has been a “good thing.”'® In their turn,
tlie federal grant universities have adapted to their
new role quite quickly and effectively.

Professor Don Price has made reference to the
following limerick;

There \vas a young lady from Kent
Who said that she knew what it meant
When men took her to dine.

Gave her cocktails and wine;

She knew what it meant — but she went.’^

I am not so sure that the universities and their
presidents always knew what it meant; but one
thing is certain — they went.

PHASE two; BUREAUCRATIC BALANCE

The general policy of federal agencies in allo-
cating research grants to universities for the last ttvo
decades has been one of “seeking excellence wher-
ever it is,” one of accepting the established pattern
and following it. The new approach is to take more
of an over-all view; to change the pattern to a
degree. Balance is the new virtue; imbalance the old
sin.

The charge, made by Logan Wilson among
others, has been that “There is no federal program

66

THE USES OF THE UMVERSITY

traditionally ha%'e both taught and conducted re-
search. But now some scholars are added to the staff
in exclusively research capacities — and increasin^y
vdth titles suggesting profesorial status. The>' have
no teaching responsibilities and are not as yet fully
accepted members of the academic communit)*.
They usually are not members of the Academic
Senate and they' usually are not given tenure — ^both
traditional marks of faculty status. In many insti-
tutions, ho^ve\^e^, they' may use the name of the
university in getting prcyects under their o^^■n
directiorL

In a far less anomalous p>osition is the faculty
member who works on a federally sponsored project
dunng the summer months and part-time during
the regiJar year, and receis'es much of his pay from
the project rather than from the university. But to
^hat extent is he really a university' employee and
what security of employment does he really have?

bstoiisly, it is no longer so clear as it once was just
who is the facultv.

4

ere has been an almost frantic remaking of the
created, ne^s- relationships estab-
u , nsv, classes of citizenship formulated and
on y paruaily assimilated. The Harvard catalogue
non- lists more than 5,000 “Officers of Instruction
and Admir^tiaUon,” many of whom are not facuin-
m the traditional sense. The “facuin"*^ in our uni-
'^mcs becomes an C'/er-chanaina group as the
dcfiniuom change. If there can stilf be said to be a

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

67

“faculty” at all, it is most certainly a different com-
posite than before. Much of the teaching, much of
the research are done by the “un-faculty.”

7. University “aid” to the federal government. Federal
aid has been of great benefit to the universities. It
has not, however, been wthout its costs in money
and effort. Overhead allowances vary greatly from
agency to agency but seldom cover all the indirect
as well as the direct costs of sponsored research.
Also, matching grants for construction may force a
university to upset its own priority system in order to
get federal funds. This, of course, is the intent.

Additionally, federal funds have placed great new
administrative burdens on the universities on fac-
ulty members, on department chairmen, on deans,
on presidents. New classes of administrators have
been created — the contracting officer and the re-
search project manager. Adminisuation becomes a
much larger aspect of the total university enterprise.
Julius A. Stratton has observed, “'Hiere is a basic
incompatibility between the true spirit of a univer
sity and those elements of management w ic ten
to creep into the organization of projects, the pla-
ning of programs, and die utilization of costly fa-

cilltics

8 Or, the border, of teroptotm- Immense sums of
money have been poured into the umvemdes by
the federal government, and umverstbes are htghly
atomistic entities. The univenaty has the res^ns.-
bility for but usually not the actual control of these

68

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

funds. Some abuses have inevitably developed.
Funds have been diverted at times from one use to
another — and the' other a use not intended by the
federal agency. Some faculty members make in-
formal alliances — if you consult on my project, then
I should consult on yours — and total income has
been pyramided through this exchange of consult-
ancies to occasionally astounding levels. When these
same faculty members sit on the federal panels that
make the grants, the whole process becomes quite
involved, to say the least. Excessive amounts of
expensive equipment have at times been purchased,
and equipment salesmen chase grants around. Some
universities promise not only a base salary but
substantial supplemental personal income and al-
lowances from federal grants as a recruiting device
in a wilder and wilder upw'ard spiral.

There have been some scandals. There will be
more. The federal agencies will exercise increasingly
specific controls and the universities dependent on
this new' standard of living will accept these controls.
The universities themselves will hav'c to exercise
more stringent controls by centralizing authority,
particularly through the audit process. In a few
situations, self-restraint has not been enough re-
straint; as one result, greater e.xternal restraint will
Ijc imposed in most situations.

ith all its problems, however, federal research
aid to universities has helped greatly in meeting
national needs. It has greatly a,ssistcd the universities

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 69

themselves. The nation is stronger. The leading
universities are stronger. As Nathan Pusey reported
the unanimous views of the presidents of universities
participating in the Carnegie study, federal aid,
over all, has been a “good thing.”'^ In their turn,
the federal grant universities have adapted to their
new role quite quickly and effectively.

Professor Don Price has made reference to the
following limerick;

There was a young lady from Kent
Who said that she knew what it meant
When men took her to dine,

Gave her cocktails and wine;

She knew what it meant — but she went’*

I am not so sure that the universities and their
presidents always knew what it meant; but one
thing is certain — they went.

PHASE two: bureaucratic balance

The general poUcy of federal agencies in aUo-
cating research grants to universities for the last two
decades has been one of “seeking excellence wher-
ever it is,” one of accepting the established pattern
and following it. The new approach is to take more
of an over-all view; to change the pattern to a
degree. Balance is the new virtue; imbalance the old
sin.

The charge, ^^de by Loga^
others, has been that There is no federal program

70

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

— merely programs.”'® The response — in the pro-
posed “National Education Improvement Act of
1963,” for example — is to provide: “A comprehen-
sive program of Federal aid to meet selected and
urgent needs of American education on all levels
from elementary school through graduate educa-
tion; to promote educational quality, expand op-
portunity for education, and to increase the capacity
of our educational institutions; to provide for the
Nation’s needs in skilled manpower, national
growth, and national security.”

The new balance calls for developing a larger
number of outstanding centers of graduate instruc-
tion and research. The Seaborg report suggested an
expansion from the present fifteen or twenty centers
to thirty or forty over a fifteen-year period.'® The
National Education Improvement Act envisages
expansion from twenty to seventy. This demand for
geographical dispersion of centers of strength fol-
lows, in part, the new realization of the role of a
university as a factor influencing the location of
industry. The Roswell L. Gilpatric report for the
Department of Defense explained the concentration
of defense contracts in California and Massachusetts
by the concentration of research and development
projects in these two states, which in turn was
attributed to the availability of university centers of
substantial strength." An educational and political
effort of considerable dimensions now seeks to re-

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 7 1

order the current pattern of distribution in the name
of balance.

Under the National Defense Education Act of
1958, preference is already given to assisting new
graduate programs in selected subject matter areas.
Teaching is being emphasized along with research.
Summer refresher courses for teachers of science,
improvement of science textbooks, and language
laboratories are programs already well established.
The National Science Foundation has a large effort
under way to improve and renovate equipment for
undergraduate teaching in the physical sciences.
Undergraduates, as well as graduate students, are
being assisted by loans and scholarships. The social
sciences are receiving increasing sums of money.
More funds are being granted to colleges as well as
to universities, and to universities of all ranks. In
particular, “institutional grants,” to supplement
project grants, are being given by the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of
Health. And NASA, among others, makes “train-
ing” grants to institutions instead of awarding
fellowships to students who may then go wherever
they wish. Thus, efforts to achieve greater “balance”
are already well under way.

The approach to a university “as an institution”
is of particular interest. If additional universities
are to be selected to become centers of strength in
research and graduate instruction, then it will be

72

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

necessary for the federal government to be con-
cerned with the “general health of the institution.
This will be a notable departure from historical
practice, except in agriculture. The Land Grant
Association, in commenting on recent recommenda-
tions by the President’s Science Advisory Committee
for dispersion through assistance to institutions as
such, said: “The recommendations represent a re-
turn to the principles of government-institution
relations laid down in the basic land grant legisla-
tion, in which the resjxmsibility for internal admin-
istration, fiscal management, and proper direction
is vested with university officers rather than with
agency staffi.”*® It should be noted that every state
has at least one land grant institution receiving
federal support on a formula basis. The parallel with
agriculture is not entirely apt, however, since agri-
culture by its very nature is locally and regionally
oriented, but national defense and space exploration
are not.

If we are to move toward federal orientation to
the “total function of the university,” then the
University Grants Committee in Great Britain is the
outstanding precedent, and one that has received
some support in the United States.’® However, there
are only about thirty universities in Great Britain
and it is clear what is and what is not a university.
Additionally, the University Grants Committee has
come to exercise more influence over the establish-
ment of new programs, the cost and size and even

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY

73

the appearance of new buildings, the equalization
of faculty salaries among institutions, and the deter-
mination of admission policies than would currentiy
be acceptable if it came from the federal govern-
ment in this country.

Some hard choices must be faced. The decentral-
ized project approach of the last two decades has
much to recommend it. It is selective on merit,
flexible in accordance with quality of performance,
and responsive to national goals. The universities
and their scholars retain substantial freedom. But
such dominant reliance on the project approach is
no longer likely. In fact, the project is already less
the chosen instrument than it once was. Productive
anarchy is no longer such a politically viable solu-
tion.

It is said that support to institutions as such will
“give a university the necessary autonomy,” and
will permit dispersion of effort and better balance in
several directions. It is not clear, however, how the
particular institutions will be chosen, or, once
chosen, how support might subsequently' be with-
drawn if performance should prove inadequate. It is
difficult to assess the merit of a total institution as
complex as a modern university. One alternative is
to rely on a formula, as in the case of agriculture in
the land grant institutions. Another is to be guided
by political influence; and this is increasingly
happening.

It is reported that Congress already senses its loss

74 the uses of the university

of control to the professional personnel in the
various agencies and would like to regain it. “Con-
gress knows it has forfeited much power over science
to the Executive and it does not like it.”*® The
Harvard self-study report notes the danger of politi-
cal interference and “log-rolling” inherent in block
grants.*’ Inter-university competition would be
taken from the quasi-academic arena of the agency
committee to the legislative halls.

Additionally, the selection of designated “centers
of strength” assumes a single source of designation
— a single over-all federal agency or committee. A
single agency means a single source of control, as
against the current pluralistic situation of several
agencies and several sources of influence, wth
opportunity to pick and choose among them. A
single source of control would turn an influential
relationship into a really “perilous partnership.”**
Finally, will funds necessarily be better spent for the
national interest under institutional control than
through the agencies, where decisions are freer from
internal rigidities and egalitarian tendencies?

In the battle over institutional versus project
support. Congressmen are more likely to prefer the
institutional approach than are the professionals in
the agencies; the presidents of universities than the
researchers within the universities; the less well-
established universities than the well-established
ones; the humanists than the scientists — generally,

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 75

those who have less under the project system than
those who have more.

It is almost obligatory in educational circles these
da)^ to support “excellence” and “balance.” They
are the two magic words. Yet “excellence” and
“balance” sometimes pull in different directions. It
is also quite necessary to favor “institutional in-
tegrity” and to be against “federal control.” Yet the
institutional grants that aid what we are supposed
to favor (integrity) may also aid what we are sup-
posed to be against (control). Turning “integrity”
over to the university president may also turn
“control” over to the federal government.

How can we really best secure “aristocracy of
achievement arising out of democracy of opportu-

nity?»23

SOME SUGGESTIONS

The nation does face some grave problems in the
field of education. Vastly increased numbers of
students are pouring into our schools. Many quali-
tative deficiencies exist. State and local subdmsions
are caught \vith relatively fixed tax structures, and
private endo^vments and gifts have their limits also.
Federal support is the most obvious way out. But
federal expenditures themselves are not unlimited,
and there are some realistic barriers to certain tjqjes
of federal involvement.

76 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

The first consideration is that the federal govern-
ment need not and cannot do everything. It seems
to me that the educaU'onal system of America, good
as it generally is, is in the most trouble — and thus in
the greatest need of federal help— at the bottom and
at the top.

At the bottom is the problem of “drop-outs” from
school and “drop-outs” of the unskilled from the
employed labor force. Through occupational train-
ing and retraining, through counseling, guidance,
and relocation, these “drop-outs” should be assisted
to acquire skills valuable in a dynamic economy
where skill levels are rising at perhaps the fastest
rate in history. Full employment is the necessary
complement to make such training effective.

At the top, the nation needs more research activ-
ity in a number of fields and more personnel of high
skill particularly engineers, scientists, mathemati-
cians, teachers, and medical doctors. A recent Bu-
reau of Labor Statistics survey shows that from now
to 1970 the expected supply of engineers and sci-
entists will fill only three quarters of the demand.
This leaves a very large gap. The prospect is par-
ticularly critical for engineers.

Fortunately the levels where federal aid is most
nectary are levels where it is most politically
feasible. My suggestions will be limited to higher
education, and to the university level in particular.

I. Federal research centers, whenever possible,
should be located near and identified with a univer-

the federal grant university

77

sity. A university, with its libraries, colleagues to
talk to, and graduate students to train, provides a
uniquely favorable environment for such centers. In
turn, such centers provide additional research op-
portunities for the university’s faculty members and
graduate students. Instead of establishing a research
center in isolation and then, perhaps, having to
build a new university at the same site, it seems to
me best to put the center near some university —
even if it doesn’t happen to be our own.

2, The project system should be continued in
essentially its present form as the major means of
supporting the research and graduate instruction
programs of universities as well as accomplishing
the specific research purposes of the federal govern-
ment. If project funds double or triple during the
decade of the sixties, as now seems likely, it wall be
possible and necessary to extend more of them
beyond the twenty institutions that constitute the
primary group of federal grant universities at the
present time. Orlans has identified about ten uni-
versities, mostly “public” ones, which already de-
serve considerably more project support on the basis
of their existing Ph.D. programs."'* Other universi-
ties will soon be moving into this group in the
natural course of events. The project s^'stem follows
established lines of contact through disciplines and
avoids the problems of establishing a new reliance
on institutional lines of contact.

The project system has resulted in a “highly

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

successful working relationship between the govern-
ment’s need for long- and short-term research
the academic scientist’s abilities and interests.

To the extent that institutional grants are given,
they should follow the project grants. Charles V.
Kidd has suggested that 25 percent might be given
as free funds to institutions, as against 75 percent in
project fiinds.^'' Twenty-five percent appears to be
an adequate figure. These institutional grants could
best be used by the universities for new projects,
small projects, support of young faculty members
unknown in Washington, and of fields neglected m
direct federal grants — all on a very flexible basis.
Thus the universities’ rather different evaluation 0
“merit” could supplement the standards for merit o
the federal agencies. I would hope that the insti-
tutional grants would be assigned automatically by
the agencies as some percentage of the project grants
which are themselves assigned on merit. If “quality
must come first,”^’ this is the best way to assure it.

Alvin M. Weinberg has recently made the
interesting suggestion that the panel system of
reviewing research proposals could be improved as
an instrument for making scientific judgments by
including on the panels representatives of related
fields, as well as representatives of the field in
question. “I should think that advice from panels so
constituted,” he says, “would be tempered by con-
cern for larger issues; in particular the support of a
propiosed research project would be viewed from the

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 79

larger perspective of the relevance of that research
to the rest of science.”®® The greater impartiality of
the panels would also be assured.

Contract and grant overhead should cover rea-
sonable indirect as well as all direct costs.

Federal project funds are increasingly being used
to bid salaries and allowances up and to bid teach-
ing assignments down. How much further such
competition can go without raising grave policy
problems for the federal agencies is problematical.
The market is sufficiently active without this added
inflationary stimulus; and the universities are suffi-
ciently in trouble with internal inequities and
reduction of teaching time.

There is currently arising a three-sided competi-
tive struggle for research and development work,
involving industry, the universities, and the govern-
ment itself.®® The universities should be preferred for
basic research and for such other research as is
readily related to graduate instruction.

It is being suggested, and also being implemented,
that federal grants and contracts be channeled
increasingly into liberal arts colleges to assist faculty
research and the training of outstanding under-
graduate students. This process can easily subvert
the colleges from their primary obligation and start
them on the way to becoming quite different types
of institutions. With a project-by-project approach
this is almost bound to happen. Would it not be well
for the governing bodies of such colleges to examine

8o

THE USES OF THE UMVERSITY

the implications of tliis changed role before the
process of prqect-by-prqject transformation of the
nature of the institution is begun? If they accept the
role they should accept it by a conscious poliQ'
decision.

3- To aid the teaching function of universities
during the “deficit years” of gready stvollen enroll-
ments just ahead, federal agencies should permit,
even encourage, postdoctoral fellows and research
professors to teach one-quarter or even one-third
thne at no cost to the institution. The present
system increases the size of the “un-faculty” and
■widens the gap between the researcher and the
student Also, the further creation of research career
professorships might well be examined. Are thty
really necessary from a research point of vieiv and
^ it really desirable to preclude their occupants
from normal participation in the full range of
academic life?

The univ^ties themselves should see to it that
mg assistantships are fully competitive wth

research assistantship and fellomhips.

^ agencies should provide space and
^mpment for their postdoctoral fellow's and re-
most professors and for all contracts and

funds 'wthout the requirement of matching

state tninr,^ Pmposes from either endowments or

r A T?- ”■*«'!’ «PP">P™te.

^ auonal Foundation for Higher Educadon

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 8 1

might well be created on the model of the National
Science Foundation. It could serve as a focal point
for tlie interests of higher education and make
grants outside the provinee of the National Science
Foundation. Such a foundation would need to
explore carefully the areas where support would be
most productive, and also the appropriate forms of
support, as did the National Science Foundation
with such skill and judgment in its fields of interest.
Areas for possible early consideration, as examples,
arc the creative arts, international studies, and
environmental planning. Each is at a stage of
considerable acdvity; each carries a high degree of
national interest. Additionally, a Foundation for
Higher Education might well undertake the support
of great regional library resources with union cata-
logues made available to other university and col-
lege libraries in the region.

6. A number of other federal programs now in
effect to aid higher education have generally worked
well and should be continued.

The established program of the Federal Housing
Authority in making loans for residence halls, stu-
dent unions, and parking structures should be con-
tinued and expanded, as should the several pro-
grams under the National Defense Education Act.
These programs are all widely dispersed in their
efforts, and affect nearly all universities and many
colleges.

Graduate fellowship programs should be ex-

82

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

panded as there arc capable graduate students to
fill them. The availability of money does not by
itself create a supply of competent candidates. At
least half of the graduate feIlo%vships should be
transferable on a national basis, and not more than
half tied to particular institutions. The practi<^ o
the Rockefeller Foundation and Woodrow Wilson
Foundation of making an institutional grant to
cover part of the institutional expenses for each
scholar might well be more ■widely emulated.

The great need for curriculum reform in many
fields, caused by the changing content and structure
of knowledge growing out of research, should be
recogmzed by federal agencies. They should sup-
port the efforts of universities to re-examine and
improve the teaching in these areas. Some support
is being given, particularly by the National Science
Foundation in the physical sciences, but unfortu-
nately some recent developments run counter to
this trend. For example, the National Institutes of
Health now cannot support any such efforts in the
biological sciences — an area where they are greatly
needed.

Foreign service projects conducted by universities
for the federal government appear to be most finit-
fill if there is a major institutional assignment for a
substantial period of time. Ad hoc projects accom-
plish little for the foreign country or for the contract-
ing university.

7- Medical and dental doctors are in short supply

THE FEDERAL GRANT UNIVERSITY 83

and will be in shorter supply. Fellowships and fa-
cilities for their training deserve high federal pri-
ority.^®

8, A Council of Advisers on Education, as sug-
gested by the American Assembly in i960,®' would
provide an opportunity for an over-all view of the
educational system and the educational needs of
the nation as no single agency can do. This would
be something like the President’s Council of Eco-
nomic Advisers, but in the educational field. Educa-
tion may well need a better-coordinated voice than
it has had, as McGeorge Bundy has so eloquently
argued,®® but the federal government also may
need a more coordinated ear.

This council might assist in the preparation of a
manpower budget covering the supply of, and de-
mand for, the skills that depend on formal educa-
tion. Indeed, beyond this the nation might benefit
from an over-all manpower budget, supplementing
its other budgets, for it would focus attention on
human resources and on the importance of develop-
ing them.

The parmership of the federal government with
higher education and particularly with the federal
grant universities over the last two decades has been
enormously productive in enlarging the pool of sci-
entific ideas and skills. Now we are entering a new
phase of widening and deepening relationships.
This new phase can carry the American commit-
ment to education to new heights of endeavor. It

84

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

can also preserve the traditional freedom of higher
education from excessive control. It can enlarge
the horizons of equality of opportunity. It can main-
tain and even increase the margin for excellence.
The challenge is to make certain it do^ all these
things.

3

THE FUTURE OF THE
CITY OF INTELLECT

rr^

I HE true American University,” David
I Starr Jordan once observed, “lies in
JL.I the future.” It still does; for American
universities have not yet developed their full iden-
tity, their unique theory of purpose and function.
They still look to older and to foreign models,'
although less and less; and the day is coming when
these models will no longer serve at all.

The task of prophecy is made difficult by the
many internal and external cross-currents to which
universities are exposed. Archibald MacLeish wrote
in 1941: “Like other private institutions. Harvard
must face the fact that gifts to the university in the
foreseeable future will not equal in bulk the gifts of
the late twenties. Like other private institutions, it
must admit that the peak of enrollment has prob-
been rcBchccI' And like otlicr private institutions
it must therefore accept the fact that this period of

86

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

its history will be a period of organization within
existing frontiers, rather than a period of extension
of existing frontiers.” * Since 1941 Harvard has be-
come a federal grant univeisity, has obtained private
gifts beyond previous experience, has expanded far
beyond its then “existing frontiers.” This illustration
serves to demonstrate that prophecy has its perils
when treating vrith as dynamic an institution in as
changing an environment as the modem American
university.

THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION

The American university is currently undergoing
its second great transformation. The first occurred
during roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, when the land grant movement and
German intellectualism were together bringing
extraordinary change. The current transformation
will cover roughly the quarter century after World
War II. The university is being called upon to edu-
cate previously unimagined numbers of students;
to respond to the expanding claims of national
^rvice; to merge its activities with industry as never

efore, to adapt to and rechannel new intellectual
currents. By the end of this period, there will be a
^ly American tmiversity, an institution unique
in world history, an institution not looking to other
models but serving, itself, as a model for universities
m other parts of the globe. This is not said in boast.

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 87

It is simply that the imperatives that have molded
the American univereity are at work around the
world.

Each nation, as it has become influential, has
tended to develop the leading intellectual institu-
tions of its world — Greece, the Italian cities, France,
Spain, England, Germany, and now the United
States. The great universities have developed in the
great periods of the great political entities of history.
Today, more tlian ever, education is inextricably
involved in the quality of a nation. It has been
estimated that over the last thirty years nearly half
of our national growth can be explained by the
greater education of our people and by better tech-
nology, which is also largely a product of the edu-
cational system."

So many of the hopes and fears of the American
people are now related to our educational system
and particularly to our universities — the hope for
longer life, for getting into outer space, for a higher
standard of tiring; our fears of Russian or Chinese
supremacy, of the bomb and annihilation, of indi-
vidual loss of purpose in the changing world. For
all these reasons and others, the university has be-
come a prime instrument of national purpose. This
is new. This is the essence of the transformation now
engulfing our universities.

The knowledge industry. Basic to this transformation
is the growth of the “knowledge industry,” which is
coming to permeate government and business and

88

the uses of the university

to draw into it more and more people raised to
higher and higher levek of skill. Tlie production,
distribution, and consumption of “knowledge” in
all its forms is said to accoimt for sg percent of gross
national product, according to Fritz Machlup’s
^Iculations; and “knowledge production” is grow-
ing at about twice the rate of the rest of the econ-
nmy.^ Knowledge has certainly never in history
been so central to the conduct of an entire society.
What the railroads did for the second half of the
last ^ntury and the automobile for the first half
of this century may be done for the second half of
this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to
serve as the focal point for national growth. And
t e university is at the center of the knowledge
process.

The university historically has been groiving in
TOncentric circles. It started wth philosophy in
reece, Md a library — the first great one — at
exan ria. It spread to the ancient professions,
an t en to science. It permeated agriculture and
^_”ginally it served the elites of soci-
rtT’rt* class as well, and now it in-

^ Idren of all, regardless of social and

economic background.

aiodem university often reflects its
his with the library and the humanities and

inc our center of the campus, extend-

laLrpVn P™f«sional schools and scientific

’ and surrounded by industry, inter-

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 9 1

fortable bit about academic freedom and the han-
dling of intellectual personnel. The two worlds are
merging physically and psychologically.

The rise of Ideopolis. University centers have a
tendency to coalesce. Allan Nevins has put it this
way: “Observers of higher education can now fore-
see the inexorable emergence of an entirely new
landscape. It will no longer show us a nation dotted
by high academic peaks with lesser hills between;
It will be a landscape dominated by mountain
ranges.” ® The highest peaks of the future will rise
from the highest plateaus.

One such plateau runs from Boston to Washing-
ton. At the universities and laboratories situated
along this range are found 46 percent of the Ameri-
can Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and 40
percent of the members of the National Academy
of Sciences. A second range with its peaks runs
along the California coast. G. P. Snow has written:
“And now the scientific achievement of the United
States is moving at a rate we all ought to marvel
at. Think of the astonishing constellation of talent,
particularly in the physical sciences, all down the
California coast, from Berkeley and Stanford to
Pasadena and Los Angeles. There is nothing like
that concentration of talent anywhere in the world.

It sometimes surprises Europeans to realize how
much of the pure science of the entire West is being
carried out in the United States. Curiously enough,
it often surprises Americans too. At a guess, the

go THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

agents are working the corridors. They also work
the placement offices. And the university, in turn,
reaches into industry, as through the Stanford
Research Institute.

The new connection of the university with the
rise and fall of industrial areas has brought about
an inter-university and interregional competition
unmatched in history except by the universities and
their Lander in nineteenth-century Germany. Texas
and Pittsburgh seek to imitate what California and
Boston have known; so also do Iowa, Seattle, and
nearly all the rest. A vast campaign is on to see that
the university center of each industrial complex shall
not be “second best.”

It is often through new academic specialties and
through athletics that the universities seeking to
rise in the academic hierarchy can most quickly and
easily attract national attention — and also by hiring
great and visible academic stars. The mark of a
university “on the make” is a mad scramble for
football stars and professorial luminaries. The
former do little studying and the latter little teach-
ing, and so they form a neat combination of muscle
and intellect.

The university and segments of industry are be-
coming more alike. As the university becomes tied
into the world of work, the professor — at least in
the natural and some of the social sciences — takes
on the characteristics of an entrepreneur. Industry,
with its scientists and tedmidans, learns an uncom-

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

92

figure is something like 80 percent, and might easily
be higher.” ^

The California mountain range has 36 percent
of the Nobel laureates in science and 20 percent of
the members of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Big Ten and Chicago constitute a third range
of academic peaks, with 10 percent of the Nobel
laureates and 14 percent of the members of the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences. These three groupings
of universities — the East Coast, California, and the
Big Ten and Chicago — currently produce over three
quarters of the doctorates conferred in the United
States. Another range may be in the process of
development in the Texas-Louisiana area.

This concentration of talent partly follows history
— the location of the older private and public uni-
versities. Partly it follows industrial strengths and
population centers. But it also has its own logic. No
one university can cover aU specialties, or cover
them well enough so that there is a sufficient cluster
of close intellectual colleagues. The scholar dislikes
intellectual isolation and good scholars tend to
swarm together. These swarms are extraordinarily
productive environments. No library can be com-
plete; nor any graduate curriculum. Some labora-
tories, to be well used, must be used by more than
one university. Thus the Big Ten and Chicago,
through their Committee on Institutional Coopera-
tion, are merging their library resources, creating a
“common market” for graduate students, diversify-

FUTURE OF THE CaTY OF INTELLECTT 93

ing their research laboratories on a common-use
basis, and parceling out foreign language specializa-
tions. Something similar is happening in the Uni-
versity of California system, and between Berkeley
and Stanford. Harvard and M.I.T., Princeton and
Pennsylvania, among others, run joint research
enterprises.

These clustering universities, in turn, have clus-
tering around them scientifically oriented industrial
and governmental enterprises. To match the draw-
ing power of the great metropolis, there now arrives
the new Ideopolis. The isolated mountain can no
longer dominate the landscape; the constellation is
greater tham the single star and adds to the bright-
ness of the sky.

There are other possible patterns for develop-
ment. France and Russia have not made their uni-
versities so central to the life of society. They have
segregated dieir research institutes to a substantial
degree and established separate institutions for
much of their technical training. Also, both have
set up their universities on a regional basis ndth one
university having a monopoly in the region. Both
France and Russia, however, are now making their
universities more central mechanisms, and Paris
and Mosco^v, in particular, are the dominating in-
stitutions. Nevertheless, their basic pattern is quite
different from the American, and, I think, not as
productive.

With these national, industrial, and academic

94 the uses of the university

pulls upon them, universities need to be quickly
responsive to opportimities, readily adaptable to
change. Yet they are basically conservative institu-
tions. Jacques Barzun in his House of Intellect presents
this “House” from an inward looking and idealistic
point of view, as one opposed to the “corruption”
of science, to modem art, to foundations with their
interdisciplinary projects, and so forth, regretting
that the “House” is no longer “a company apart,” *
However, the “City of Intellect” of the modem uni-
versity also must look outward and to reality; it
cannot be “a company apart.” This conflict between
internal and external dynamics has always been a
difficult one for universities but never so intense as
at present when the imperatives of change press so
unmercifiilly against the necessities of internal
harmony.

CONSERVATIVE INSTITUTIONS — DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT

There are two great cliches about the university.
One pictures it as a radical institution, when in fact
it is most conservative in its institutional conduct.
The other pictures it as autonomous, a cloister, when
the historical fact is that it has always responded,
but seldom so quickly as today, to the desires and
demands of external groups — sometimes for love,
sometimes for gain, increasingly willingly, and, in
some cases, too eagerly. The external view is that
the university is radical; the internal reality is that

FUTtJRE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 95

it is conservative. The internal illusion is that it is a
law unto itself; the external reality is that it is
governed by history.

The university’s gate of Janus leads inward as
well as outward, and inside the gate the social land-
scape changes remarkably. When one looks inward
toward the “ivory tower,” he sees a different
“looking-glass land.” Here, to get somewhere, you
must run twice as slowly. This is as it must be. The
university, as an institution, needs to create an
environment that gives to its faculty members:

a sense of stability — they should not fear constant
change that distracts them from their work;

a sense of security — they should not need to worr)'
about the attacks against them from outside the
gate;

a sense of continuity — they should not be con-
cerned that their work and the structure of their
lives wll be greatly disrupted;

a sense of equity — they should not be suspicious
that others are being treated better than they are.

Inventiveness should be left to the individual
faculty member ^vithin the protection and solidity
of the surrounding institutional structure. Galileo
^vithin the conservative institution of Padua in his
day, Erasmus at Oxford and Freiburg, Newton at
Cambridge helped start the enormous metamoipho-
sis from which the modem world emerged. But their
institutions, as institutions, were stolidly changeless.
The faculty guild. “Nothing should ever be done for

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

96

the first time” was the wry conclusion of F. M.
Comford from his vantage point as a classicist at
Cambridge University at the turn of the century
when Cambridge was stirring with responses to the
modem world. He added that “Nothing is ever done
un til every one is convinced that it ought to be done,
and has been convinced for so long that it is now
time to do something else.”® John Stuart Mill had
looked upon the British imiversities of his day as
largely unrelated to the progress of national life.
Harold Laski, a century after Mill, felt that Oxford
and Cambridge operated under a form of “syndi-
calism,” which he considered the antithesis of the
social usefulness he sought, and that they were only
partly saved by being shaken up by royal commis-
sions every thirty or forty years. Flexner referred to
universities generally as “institutions usually re-
garded as conservative, frequently even as strong-
holds of reaction,” and added that “institutions as
such tend for quite obvious reasons to lag behind
the life which they express and further.’”®

With reference to the American scene, Frederick
Rudolph in his recent authoritative study of Ameri-
can colleges and universities concluded that “Re-
sistance to fundamental reform was ingrained in
the American collegiate and university tradition,
as over three hundred years of history demonstrated.

. . . Except on rare occasions, the historic policy of
the American college and university [was]: drift,
reluctant accommodation, belated recognition that

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 97 .

while no one was looking, change had in fact taken
place.”” Nevitt Sanford, after a study of more
contemporary focus, observed that there have been
few innovations at all and even fewer “initiated by
college or university faculties”; when a movement
for reform has come, “it is the collective faculty who
usually seem to be dragging their feet.”

There is a kind of “guild mentality” in the aca-
demic profession, as in many others. The guild was
isolationist toward society, devoted to producer as
against consumer sovereignty, and committed more
to guild rules tlian to quick adaptation to popular
demand. The guild was egalitarian, full of senatorial
courtesy, selective of its own members. It was also
a “sort of club” as Snow has characterized the col-
leges of Cambridge and Oxford,” and an “oligarchy
of senior professors” as Ashby has noted about these
same institutions.” In Germany, the faculty was
more a class structure than a guild — a class struc-
ture intimately tied into the class structure of the
surrounding society, hierarchical rather than fra-
ternal.

The self-contained guild idea is still an attractive
ideal. One recent call to faculty members is to
“close our gates,” become “masters wthm our
walls,” assume a “posture of offence” against the
surrounding society.^® Yet, except in a few situations,
the faculty guild has never been a fully self-govern-
ing guild in reality, and almost never a company
of “free agents,”” much as it might like to believe

98 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

itself one. However, the guild idea, the “Republic of
Scholars,” is often and understandably the faculty
member’s vision of “pie-in-the-sky.”

Some of history has swirled past the “guild”; some
has disrupted it; some has transformed it; some has
swept it entirely away. Much of the Renaissance
occurred completely outside the university. The
university was generally allied against the Reforma-
tion, although bitter fights were fought within many
universities, and in some the reformers emerged
triumphant. The industrial, democratic, and sci-
entific revolutions have gradually moved in on the
universities and changed them almost beyond recog-
nition. Some revolutions, like the French and Rus-
sian, placed the “guild” fully under state control,
although it has regained some of its ancient rights
in France. In all of these intellectual and social revo-
lutions, the university, as an institution, was initially
more a “stronghold of reaction” than a revolutionary
force, although the ideas of its individual members
have often been a stimulus to change.

Eric Ashby has said that policy should “seep
gradually upward” within the guild.*^ Sometimes
it has. In Oxford and Cambridge, research of extra-
ordinary quality developed when the guild was still
in control and still devoted to the classics. But, gen-
erally, change, when it has come, has been initiated
or at least assisted from outside the gates, as the case
of England today so decisively demonstrates. The
educational revolution now going on there comes

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 99

from the outside and above, and finds its greatest
proponents in the Labor Party.

The individual faculty member, and particularly
the political liberal on the faculty, is often torn be-
tween the “guild” and tlie “socialist” views of the
university. The guild view stands for self-determina-
tion, and for resistance against the administration
and the trustees; the socialist view, for service to
society which the administration and the trustees
often represent. The guild view is elitist toward the
external environment, conservative toward internal
change, conformist in relation to the opinion of col-
leagues. The socialist view is democratic toward
society, radical toward change, and nonconformist.
And the political liberal is drawn toward both vietvs.
Here is a paradox. Few instituitions are so con-
servative as the universities about their own affairs
while their members are so liberal about the affairs
of others; and sometimes the most liberal faculty
member in one context is the most conservative in
another. The natural radical, -witlun the context of
the guild, is radically conservative. The faculty
member who gets arrested as a “freedom rider in
the South is a flaming supporter of unanimous prior
faculty consent to any change whatsoever on his
campus in the North. The door to the faculty club
leads both out and in.

Change is a traumatic experience for an academic
community, as for others. The Yale faculty in 1828
rejected in theory, while proving in practice, that

100

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

colleges “by being immovably moored to the same
station . . . serve only to measure the rapid current
of improvement which is passing by them. ' Iri ^
very real sense, the faculty is the university— its most
productive element, its source of distinction. And
faculty members are properly partners in the enter-
prise with areas reserved for their exclusive control.
Yet when change comes it is rarely at the instigation
of this group of partners as a collective body. The
group is more likely to accept or reject or comment,
than to devise and propose. The group serves a pur-
pose as a balance wheel — resisting some things that
should be resisted, insisting on more thorough
discussion of some things that should be more
thoroughly discussed, delaying some developments
where delay gives time to adjust more gracefully
to the inevitable. All this yields a greater sense of
order and stability.

Institutional changes are coming, however, m
areas under faculty control or influence. Some of
the needed revisions will be troublesome. In many
places, curricula and calendars will need to be re-
studied; undergraduate teaching renovated; faculty
concepts of equality of treatment revised; mechan-
ization of some elements of instruction installed;
some fields of study (like biology) revolutionized.
These changes will come in the face of much faculty
hesitation and even some resistance. At least two
changes, however, will have faculty support. One
will be directed toward overcoming the fractionali-

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 10 1

zation of the intellectual world, and the other will
call for procedures devised to make administration
more personal, including faculty administration.

The faculty world seems to sense a loss of unity —
intellectual and communal unity. In large measure
this can be attributed to “the overwhelming pre-
dominance of things that are new over things that
are old” and to what Robert Oppenheimer calls
“a thinning of common knowledge.” Knowledge
is now in so many bits and pieces and administration
so distant that faculty members are increasingly
figures in a “lonely crowd,” intellectually and in-
stitutionally. It is a sad commentary on the “com-
munity of masters” when its elements come together
in intercliange only when they coalesce feverishly
over a grievance about some episode related to a
change of the calendar or a parking fee.

Quite fortunately, however, there is a kind of
senatorial courtesy within the collective faculty
about changes desired by a single member, or a few.
Changes initiated from the outside, as in the devel-
opment of the federal grant university, which also
have their internal supporters, are especially easy
to accomplish. The individual faculty member seek-
ing something new has, in turn, often found his
greatest encouragement and leverage coming from
the outside; the individual scholar is the inventor,
the outside agency the force for innovation. The
inventing faculty member almost instinctively knows
that internal change will come more easily if he

102

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

obtains the external support of a foundation or a
federal agency. These outside-to-inside and inside-
to-outside alliances have been great sources o
progress.

Much change also takes place largely outsi e
collective faculty purview, outside the “veto groups
of the academic community — in the new depart-
ment or institute, the new project, the new campus.
The institute, in particular, has been as much the
vehicle of innovation in recent years as the depart-
ment has been the vault of tradition. Change comes
more through spawning the new than reforming
the old.

When change does come, it may be by the slow
process of persuasion, or by subversion as through
the inside-outside alliance, or by evasion as in the
new enterprise, or by external decision. The aca-
demic community, regardless of the particular proc-
ess involved, is more changed than changing; change
is more unplanned than planned.

'’^Remembrance of things past” If the collective facul-
ties represent the present, the collective alumni rep-
resent the past — as much the best of the past as
the faculty the best of the present. The alumni are
oriented toward their own undergraduate days.
There seems to be a rising sense of alumni concern
as the rate of change rises. Generally it is over the
preservation of an emphasis on teaching as against
research; of the beauty of the old campus as against
the asphalt and concrete and glass of the recent

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT I03

“improvements”; of the quality of remembered
undergraduate life in its totality; of the old admis-
sion requirements which let the old grads get in; of
athletic teams that never lost a game; of the spirit
of the “halls of ivy” as against the technological
materialism of the federal grant university; of the
integrity of the old alma mater against the blandish-
ments from Washington. The older and the smaller
and the more private and the more distinguished
the university, the greater the intensity of these con-
cerns.

If the alumni are concerned, the undergraduate
students are restless. Recent changes in the Ameri-
can university have done them little good — lower
teaching loads for the faculty, larger classes, the use
of substitute teachers for the regular faculty, the
choice of faculty members based on research accom-
plishments rather than instructional capacity, the
fragmentation of knowledge into endless subdivi-
sions. There is an incipient revolt of undergraduate
students against the faculty; the revolt that used to
be against the faculty in loco parentis is now against
the faculty in absentia. The students find themselves
under a blanket of impersonal rules for admissions,
for scholarships, for examinations, for degrees. It is
interesting to watch how a faculty intent on few
rules for itself can fashion such a plethora of them
for the students. The students also want to be treated
as distinct individuals.

If the faculty looks on itself as a guild, the un er

104 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

graduate students are coming to look upon them-
selves more as a “class”; some may even feel like a
“lumpen proletariat.” Lack of faculty concern for
teaching, endless rules and requirements, and im-
personality are the inciting causes. A few of the
“nonconformists” have another kind of revolt in
mind. They seek, instead, to turn the university, on
the, Latin American or Japanese models, into a
fortress from which they can sally forth with im-
punity to make their attacks on society.

If federal grants for research brought a major
revolution, then the resultant student sense of neg-
lect may bring a minor counterrevolt, although the
target of the revolt is a most elusive one.

The big state universities are most vulnerable to
charges of neglect of students. The private univer-
sities, tied more to tradition, to student tuition, to
alumni support, to smaller size, have generally far
better preserved their devotion to undergraduate
life.

In inter-university competition, the distribution
of the ablest students, as shown by the statistics on
scholarship winners, is a telling point. A university’s
share of the ablest students is an important element
in its ranking: how attractive is its educational pro-
gram to the students most entitled to make a choice?

Student pressures for better undergraduate in-
struction may be supplemented by the complaints
of parents, who think their children are being sac-
rificed on the altar of research. Also, the public at

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT I05

large, whose attention has been riveted on the ele-
mentary and secondary schools as the “population
bulge” has affected them, may now turn its atten-
tion increasingly to the university level when the
“bulge” reaches there. Generally the public is more
interested in quality of instruction than in quantity
of research. The spotlight which the universities
have helped turn on the teaching of others at lower
levels may now be turned on their own.

External imperatives. The truly major changes in
university life have been initiated from the outside,
by such forces as Napoleon in France, ministers of
education in Germany, royal commissions and the
University Grants Committee in Great Britain, the
Communist Party in Russia, the emperor at the
time of the Restoration in Japan, the lay university
governing boards and the federal Congress in the
United States — and also, in the United States, by
the foundations. The foundations, quickly respon-
sive to needs and possibilities, have been the main
instruments, for example, in the reform of medical
education, the introduction of interdisciplinary
studies, the involvement of universities in world
affairs. As catalysts, their influence has been enor-
mous. The new developments might have been
undertaken within the universities themselves, but
they were not.

Prospective changes can be identified, in part,
by the interests of the external initiators — trustees,
state governments, foundations, industry, the federal

fHi i-w.'.ot ittr t'MVfp.niv

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utiliy,ati(jn of t!ir ratrnfi.ir, rxftrrWr niindxr^
cotincv, ntndiattimtion of uj*.trsirtian: * '

problem'; rrlamrl to .'iratmintrlntion of the v;vn
numl)cn> of yoiinc [>eo;>!r ahrady knwkinc oti the
<hy>n;

probleinn rcinteti (o puljlic r.er.'icr-'-cnhtinil pro-
gntn«. urban nxirmion. affvicc to and Mern!
legislators anrl agencies;

problems related to the <tipply of trained jjenon-
ficl for indti.'trv' and the ptjbiic, particularly rngi*
neers, w;ientist.s. and d'K'iors;

tjiicstioris alKjtit the quality and availability of
research, particularly the et.tablir.iunent of addi*
liana! university rcr-eard» centers;

problem.^ related to the ersploitaiion of new dis-
coveries, particularly in the biological .sciences and
spreading out into the health sciences and atrriail'
ture.

Additionally there Is a general public concern
v,ith morality’ on the campus; with the so-called
lx:atnib, v.dth the young radicals, with cheating,
and vsith m;x. dlrcrc is also a deep concern afwut
ov, far, and how fast, research discoveries rnay
^ange ihc lives of cvcry'one. These “moral" concerns
^ l^icoming maillxtx of tlic administrator.

0 external origin of most changes raises very*

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT I07

grave problems: how to identify the “good” and the
“bad,” and how to embrace the good and resist the
bad. There is also a problem of timing — how to
adjust not too rapidly and not too slowly. And there
are the problems of how to change the content of
the university without changing its essential forms;
of how to reconcile the conservatism of the collective
faculty with the radical function of the total institu-
tion as carried out primarily by the individual
faculty members. These obligations to select the
good and reject the bad, to pace the rate of change,
and to discover the methods of change that will do
least damage to traditional processes fall primarily
on the reluctant shoulders of the administrator. And
as Cornford remarked: “You think (do you not?)
that you have only to state a reasonable case, and
people must listen to reason and act upon it at once.
It is just this conviction that makes you so un-
pleasant.”

Today, changes are occurring quite rapidly and
spontaneously. In addition, inter-university rivalry
has become so intense that the rate of acceptance of
change has been accelerated. The current problem
is not so much that the university does not fully
control the direction of its own development — it
seldom has — but rather that it must make what are
judged to be essential adjustments so often and so
quickly, like an zimoeba in an unfriendly environ-
ment. This has added to the strains placed on the
internal structure of the institution. At the same

I08 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

time, however, the current rate of growth in num-
bers helps to relieve these strains, for a period of
growth necessarily involves considerable flexibility.
Still, the major test of the modern American uni-
versity is how wisely and how quickly it adjusts to
the important new possibilities. The great univer-
sities of the future will be those which have adjusted
rapidly and effectively.

THE NEW FACES OF CHANGE

The universities are currently facing three great
areas of related adjustments: growth, shifting aca-
demic emphases, and involvement in the life of
society. The direction of adjustment in each of these
areas is reasonably clear; the detailed arrangements
and the timing are not.

I. Growth. The number of university and college
students in the United States will almost double
during the igGo’s. This addition of three million will
duplicate in one decade the growth of the three
centuries since Harvard was founded. The propor-
tion of graduate students will rise considerably, and
there are already 25,000 postdoctoral students.

Existing campuses are being enlarged and many
new ones founded. This will be the greatest period
of campus renovation and establishment in Ameri-
can history. A particularly large niunber of junior
colleges will be formed as the junior college move-
ment becomes nationwide.

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT

log

New centers of graduate strength are emerging,
and a network of alliances is being formed among
the old and the new centers in the competition to
offer the greatest total combination of resources.

To accommodate the great increase in enroll-
ments, many calendars are being rearranged, par-
ticularly in state-supported institutions, to permit
more nearly year-round use of physical facilities.
Students tvill be able to accelerate their work if they
wish, and generally students wll come and go ivith
less reference to their “class”; more of them ivill
drop in and drop out as suits their particular
schedules and needs.

There will be some further mechanization of in-
struction (television, language laboratories, pro-
grammed learning) to improve quality and to save
faculty time for other endeavors, including more
individual work ivith students. The sciences wll
almost eagerly embrace these aids to learning. The
foreign language departments wll be rather re-
luctant, because these devices can threaten their
structure of faculty employment and the recruit-
ment and utilization of graduate students.

Because of the competition for faculty members,
salaries i\all continue to rise; fringe benefits of all
sorts \vill be devised to tie professors to a particular
campus. In addition to competition among univer-
sities, there is also intensified competition ivith in-
dustr^’^ and government. This competition has ob-
vious advantages in raising faculty income but it

1 1 0 THE USES OF THE U>T\^RSITY

has its negative aspects. As the market becomes more
active, internal equity \^^ll be injured, for some
disciplines are much more in demand in the market
than others. Teaching loads v,tI1 be competitively
reduced, sometimes to zero, although more teachers
are needed and students are complaining about lack
of attention. The identification of the professor
his university ^viil be generally loosened — he "will
become more a member of a free-floating profession.
The rules regarding how much time a professor can
spend away from his university assignments and
those afiecting the sources of his income Avithin the
university tvoU continue to be in great flux.

This current phenomenon of rising salaries and
benefits, however, may be of relatively short dura-
tion, lasting, perhaps, for the remainder of this
decade. Faculty salaries have been catching up 'rith
incomes in other professions after an historical lag.
By 1970, also, the personnel deficit of today may be
turning into the surplus of tomorrow as all the new
Ph,D.’s roll into the market. A new plateau of com-
pensation may be reached in the igyo’s. But in the
long run, it is common labor more than uncommon
talent that is rising in its comparative monetary
evaluation, as the educational process tmcovers
more talent and depletes the ranks of those \%’illing
to do common labor,

2. Shifiing academic emphases. Knowledge is ex-
ploding along ’svith population. There is also an ex-

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT III

plosion in the need for certain skills. The university
is responding to all these explosions.

The vastly increased needs for engineers, scien-
tists, and doctors will draw great resources to these
areas of the university. Also, some new professions
are being born. Others are becoming more formally
professional, for example, business administration
and social work. The university becomes the chief
port of entry for these professions. In fact, a profes-
sion gains its identity by making the university the
port of entry. This creates new roles for education;
but it is also part of the process of freezing the
structure of the occupational pyramid and assuring
that the well-behaved do advance, even if the gen-
iuses do not. The university is used as an egg-
candling device; and it is, perhaps, a better one than
any other that can be devised, but the process takes
some of the adventure out of occupational survival,
and does for some professions what the closed shop
has done for some unions. The life of the universities
for a thousand years has been tied into the recog-
nized professions in the surrounding society, and
the universities will continue to respond as new
professions arise.

The fastest-growing intellectual field today is
biology. Here there is a veritable revolution where
the doctrine of evolution once reigned supreme. To
the classifying efforts of the past are being added
the new analytical methods of the present, often

II2

THE USES OF THE tJNIVEESITY

drawn from chemistry and physics. There are levek
of complexity to be explored in aU living structures.
The “code of life” can now be read; soon it will be
understood, and soon after that, used. It is an intel-
lectual discovery of unique and staggering prop-
portions. The secrets of the atom, much as they have
changed and are changing human activity on this
planet, may hold no greater significance than the
secrets still hidden in the genetic code. If the first
half of the twentieth century may be said to have
belonged to the physical sciences, the second half
may well belong to the biological. Resources wdthin
the universities -will be poured into the new biology
and into the resulting new medicine and agriculture,
well supported though medicine and agriculture
aheady zue.

Another field ready to bloom is that of the creative
arts, hitherto the ugly ducklings or Cinderellas of
the academic world. America is bursting wth cre-
ativity in painting, music, literattue, Ae theater
with a vigor equaled in fe\v other parts of the world
today. Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, Eng-
land, the Low Countries have had great periods
of cultural flowering. America is having one nmv.
In the arts the universities have been more hos-
pitable to the historian and the critic than to the
creator; he has foxmd his havens elsewhere. Yet it
IS the creativity of science that has given science its
prestige in the university. Perhaps creativity will do
the same again for the humanities, though there

FUTURE OF THE CITV' OF INTELLECT 1 1 3

may be less new to create than has recently been
true in science and the tests of value are far less
precise. A very important role remains for the his-
torian of past ages of creativity and for the critic of
the current productions. But the universities need
to find ways also to accommodate pure creative
effort if they are to have places on stage as well as
in the wings and in the audience in the great drama
of cultural grouth now playing on the American
stage.

These possibilities for expansion — in the training
of engineers, scientists, doctors, and the newer pro-
fessionals, in biolog)', and in the creative arts, among
various others — raise again the problem of balance.
As James Bryant Conant has noted, the Western
world has had for a tliousand years a continuing
problem of “keeping a balance beuveen the ad-
vancement of knowledge, professional education,
general education, and the demands of student
life.”==

But the balance is always changing; this is the
unbalancing reality. The balance is not equal treat-
ment, the provision of equal time in some mechani-
cal and eternal way between teaching and research,
or between the humanities and science. The dy-
namics of balance did not give equal treatment to
the available scientist in Padua in 1300 when Giotto
was painting his chapel, or to the available artist in
Padua in 1600 when Galileo was lecturing from his
crude platform. Balance cannot be determined on

114 USES OF Tin: university

the scales by blind justice, field versus field and
activity versus activity,

Tlic essence of balance is to match support with
the intellectual creativity of subject fields; with the
need for skills of die highest level; with the kinds
of expert service that society currently most requires.
None of these measures is constant. Balance requires,
therefore, a shifting set of judgments which relates
facilities and attention to the possibilities inherent
in each field, each skill, each activity at that moment
of time in that environment, yet preserves for all
fields their essential integrity. To know balance is
to know the potcndal creativity, the potential pro-
ductivity, the potential contribution of each com-
peting activity in an unfolding pattern of time and
an evolving landscape of environment. To know
balance is to know more than anyone can ever know
in advance. But decisions must nevertheless be made
and time will tell how well. The only certainly
wrong decision is that the balance of today must be
preserved for tomorrow. Wlicrc will the world’s
work and the university’s work best be done? The
answer to that question is the true definition of bal-
ance.

3. Involvement in the life of society. Knowledge is
now central to society. It is wanted, even demanded,
by more people and more institutions than ever
before. The university as producer, wholesaler and
retailer of knowledge cannot escape service. Knowl-
edge, today, is for everybody’s sake.

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 115

The campus and society are undergoing a some-
what reluctant and cautious merger, already well
advanced. M.I.T. is at least as much related to in-
dustry and government as Iowa State ever ^vas to
agriculture. Extension work is really becoming
“life-long learning.” Harvard today has four post-
graduate doctors in its medical school for every one
still working for his degree^ so also for many other
skills including business. Tele\asion makes it pos-
sible for extension to reach into literally every home;
the boundaries of the university are stretched to
embrace all of society. The student becomes alum-
nus and the alumnus continues as student; the grad-
uate enters the outside world and the public enters
the classroom and the laboratorj'. Knowledge has
the terrifying potential of becoming popular, open-
ing a Pandora’s box.

The .campus becomes a center for cultural life; it
has a ready-made audience in its students and fac-
ulty and it has the physical facilities. Persons at-
tracted. by the performing and visual arts and the
lectures come to live around the campus — also as-
sorted crackpots. As the doumtotvn area in some
cities decays, the campus takes its place as the cul-
tural center of the community. A new dimension
has been added to the land grant idea of service.

The New Deal took professors to Washington
from many campuses, the New Frontier from more
than just one. In Wisconsin before World War I,
the campus and tlie state house in Madison were

Il6 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

exceptionally close. Today the campus is being
drawn to the city hall and the state capitol as never
before. The politicians need new ideas to meet the
new problems; the agencies need expert advice on
how to handle the old. The professor can supply
both. Keynes concluded his General Theory as follows:
“. . . the ideas of economists and political philoso-
phers, both when they are right and when they are
wrong, are more powerful than is commonly under-
stood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Prac-
tical men, who believe themselves to be quite ex-
empt from any intellectual influences, are usually
the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in
authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling
their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few
years back. I am sure that the power of vested in-
terests is vastly exaggerated compared with the
gradual encroachment of ideas.” As, for example,
the ideas of Keynes.

The university must range itself on the side of
intelligent solutions to sometimes unintelligent ques-
tions. These questions more and more arise from
abroad as well as at home; and the quality of the
answers has been made all the more crucial in a

world swept by Communist and nationalist revolu-
tions.

There are those who fear the further involvement
of the university in the life of society. They fear that
the university ^vill lose its objectivity and its freedom.
But society is more desirous of objectivity and more

1 18 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

the general and the specialized all add their share
to over-all excellence. The total system is extra-
ordinarily flexible, decentralized, competitive — and
productive. The new can be tried, the old tested
with considerable skill and alacrity. Pluralism in
higher education matches the pluralistic American
society. The multiversity, in particular, is the child
of middle-class pluralism; it relates to so much of
the variety of the surrounding society and is thus so
varied internally.

The general test of higher education is not how
much is done poorly, and some is; rather it is how
much is done superbly, and a great deal is, to the
nation’s great benefit. Although it has been said
that the best universities in America have been
caught in a “stalemate of success,”*^ there is no
stalemate; there is some success.

CHANGES STILL TO COME

There has been some success, but there are some
problems still to be fully faced; and they are prob-
lems of consequence.

One is the improvement of undergraduate in-
struction in the university. It will require the solu-
tion of many sub-problems: how to give adequate
recognition to the teaching skill as well as to the
research performance of the faculty; how to create
a curriculum that serves the needs of the student as
well as the research interests of the teacher; how to

FUTURE OF THE aTV OF INTELLECT

prepare tlie generalist as well as the specialist in an
age of specialization looking for better generaliza-
tions; how to treat the individual student as a unique
human being in the mass student body; how to make
the university seem smaller even as it grows larger;
how to establish a range of contact beUveen faculty
and students broader than the one-%vay route across
the lectern or through the telewsion screen; ho^v to
raise educational policy again to the forefront of
faculty concerns. Increasingly, also, the better in-
stitutions will need to keep in mind that many of
their undergraduate students \vill be going on to
graduate scliool, and therefore that they need in-
dividual attention as pre-graduate students.

Another major task is to create a more unified
intellectual world. We need to make contact be-
tween the two, the three, tlie many cultures; to open
channels of intelligent conversation across the dis-
ciplines and diwsions; to close the gap between
C- P. Snow’s “Luddites” and scientists;"^ to answer
fragmentation with general theories and sensitivities.
Even philosophy, which once ^\'as the hub of the
intellectual universe, is now itself fragmented into
such diverse specialties as mathematics and seman-
tics. However, the physical sciences are drawing to-
gether as new discoveries create more basic general
theories; the biological sciences may be pulled to-
gether in the process now going on; the social sci-
ences might be unified around the study of orgamza-
tions and the relations of individuals to and within

120

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

them. Chemistry and social psychology may come
to be central focalizing fields. As knowledge is
drawn together, if in fact it is, a faculty may again
become a community of masters; but “a sense of the
unity ... of all knowledge” is still a very long way
off.

A third problem is to relate administration more
directly to individual faculty and students in the
massive institution. We need to decentralize below
the campus level to the operating agencies; to make
the collective faculty a more vital, dynamic, pro-
gressive force as it now is only at the departmental
level; to bridge the growing chasm between the de-
partment that does the teaching and the institute
that does the research, with the faculty member torn
between; to make the old departments and divisions
more compatible with the new divisions of knowl-
edge; to make it possible for an institution to see
itself in totality rather than just piecemeal and in
the sweep of history rather than just at a moment
of time; to bring an understanding of both internal
and external realities to all those intimately related
to the process, so that there may be greater under-
standing; to see to it that administration serves and
stimulates rather than rules the institution, that it be
expendable when necessary and flexible all the time;
to assure that the university can do better what it

oes best, to solve the whole range of governmental
problems within the university.

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 12 1

Additionally, there is the urgent issue of how to
preserve a margin for excellence in a populist soci-
ety, when more and more of the money is being
spent on belralf of all of the people. The great uni-
versity is of necessity elitist — tlie elite of merit — but
it operates in an environment dedicated to an egali-
tarian philosophy. How may the contribution of
the elite be made clear to the egalitarians, and how
may an aristocracy of intellect justify itself to a
democracy of all men? It was equality of oppor-
tunity, not equality per se, that animated the found-
ing fathers and the progress of the American system;
but the forces of populist equality have never been
silent, the battle between Jeffersonianism and
Jacksonianism never finally settled.

If there are to be new departures, they are most
likely to come on the campuses of those old, private
universities which have prided themselves on con-
trol of their own destiny, and on the totally new
campuses of the state universities in America and
the new public universities in Britain. The univer-
sity for the twenty-first century is more likely to
emerge from these environments than from any
others. Out of the pride of the old and the vacuum
of the new may come the means to make under-
graduate life more exciting, intellectual discourse
more meaningfiil, administration more human.
And perhaps tliere will arise a more dynamic dem-
onstration of how excellence makes democracy more

122

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

vital and its survival more assured. Then the univer-
sities may rise to “the heights of the times” and
overcome “their inspirational poverty.”

George Beadle, president of the University of
Chicago, once implied that the very large American
university (but not his own) might be like the dino-
saur which “became extinct because he grew larger
and larger and then sacrificed the evolutionary flexi-
bility he needed to meet changing conditions”;^®
its body became too large for its brain. David Ries-
man has spoken of the leading American univer-
sities as “directionless ... as far as major innovations
are concerned”;*® they have run out of foreign
models to imitate; they have lost their “ferment.”
The fact is that they are not directionless; they have
been moving in clear directions and with consider-
able speed; there has been no “stalemate,” But
these directions have not been set as much by the
university’s visions of its destiny as by the external
environment, including the federal government, the
foundations, the surrounding and sometimes en-
gulfing industry.

The university has been embraced and led down
t the garden path by its environmental suitors; it has
been so attractive and scT accommodating; who could
resist it and why would it, in turn, want to resist?

But the really new problems of today and tomor-
row may lend themselves less to solutions by external
authority , they may be inherently problems for in-

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT

123

ternal resolution. The university may now again
need to find out whether it has a brain as well as a
body.

THE CITIES OF INTELLECT

We have been speaking of the City of Intellect
as a university city with its satellite suburbs. Tlie
City of Intellect may be viewed in a broader con-
text, encompassing all the intellectual resources of
a society, and the even broader perspective of the
force of intellect as the central force of a society —
its soul. Will it be the salvation of our society?

The organized intellect is a great machine that
has gained extraordinary momentum since the
Greeks got it going 2500 years ago. It turns out its
countless new pieces of knowledge but with little
thought for their consequences — their impact on the
environment — like a new insecticide. Its attention
to problems quite naturally does not always relate
primarily to their importance but often, instead, to
the possibility of their solution. Thus the problems
of rising population and rising levels of destructive
capacity move along without study commensurate
with their inherent significance. Does tliis machine
have within it the “seeds of its owm destruction”?
Or can it develop an over-all rationality? As Lee
DuBridge of Cal Tech has said: “Scientists and
engineers do worry about the consequences of their

124

THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

works. But neither they nor anyone else has dis-
covered how to avoid or even to predict these con-
sequences.”

The process cannot be stopped. The results can-
not be foreseen. It remains to adapt. And here the
social sciences and humanities may find their par-
ticular roles in helping to define the good as well as
the true and to add wisdom to truth. It may not be
the conflict of cultures that is so crucial but rather
the rate at which each culture moves forward. Can
the intellect come to handle all the problems it
creates in the course of solving other problems? Can
the university help solve the growing war between
the future and the past? Can the span of intellectual
comprehension be widened spatially and tempo-
rally?

Intellect has also become an instrument of na-
tional purpose, a component part of the “military-
industrial complex.” Our Western City of Intellect
finds its counterpart or counterparts in the East.
In the war of the ideological worlds, a great deal
depends on the use of this instrument. Knowledge
is durable. It it also transferable. Knowledge c^ste
a great deal to produce, less to reproduce. Thus it
only pays to produce knovi/led^ if through produc-
tion it can be put into use better and faster. The
Communist City of Intellect has been a planned
community. It grows only in certain directions and
in certain ways. This allows concentration of effort
but limits growth and recognition except in re-

FUTURE OF THE CITY OF INTELLECT 1 25

stricted segments of the intellectual world. This
City flourishes in science and in militar>^ might but
lags in the humanities and the social sciences. Whole
areas that would be covered by a really modern
City of Intellect are largely unpopulated.

The t\vo Cities of Intellect are not only sources
of weapons — they also form a potential bridge be-
tween their two societies. Knowledge is universal.
Its creators generally prefer freedom. To tlie extent
the Eastern City of Intellect grows and makes con-
tact with the Western, it almost inevitably changes
its own society. Here a certain type of society really
may carry' the “seeds of its own destruction.” It
either competes and changes, or it loses some of its
over-all power of competition.

Marx saw technology as tire major force in his-
tory; but intellect creates technology' and the logic
of intellect’s development may be quite different
from the unraveling of the “mode of production” as
Marx visualized it. History has seldom, if ever,
proved a theorist to be so incorrect and at the same
time so influential as Marx. The wave of the future
may more nearly be middle-class democracy,®’
with all its freedoms, through its better use of intel-
lect in all intellect’s many dimensions, than the
“dictatorship of the proletariat” (which, in fact, is
the dictatorship of the single party). But it has not
yet been proved conclusively whetlier intellect can
preserve and even create the culture of freedom, m
which it best flourishes, more effectively than tech-

1 26 THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY

nology, under Ck)rnmunist leadership, can be used
to bolster dictatorship.

The intellect, and the university as its most happy
home, can have great potential roles to play in the
reconciliation of the war between the future and
the past, and the solution — one way or the other —
of the war between the ideological giants who now
rend the world with their struggles. Certain it is,
however, that the reconciliation of the future and
the past can only be made more elusive in the con-
text of an ideological struggle where survival is
almost the sole essence of rational behavior. The
two problems compound each other’s effects.

At the outset I quoted Cardinal Newman on his
“Idea of a University,” reflecting the beautiful
ivory tower of Oxford as it once was. It seems ap-
propriate to conclude with Alfred North White-
head’s prophetic words in 1916 on the place of
intellect: “In the conditions of modern life, the rule
is absolute: the race which docs not value trained
intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not
all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your
victories on land or sea, can move back the finger
of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow
science will have moved fortvard yet one more step,
and there will be no appeal from the judgment
which will be pronounced on the uneducated.

These are the uses of the university.

NOTES

CiiAnT-R i; TIjc Idea of a Muhivereity

'John Henry Cardinal Newman, The M(a of a University
(New York: Longmans Green and Co., 19.17). Tlie quotations
used here arc from pp. 129, 91, .x.xv'ii, 157.

' Franci.s B.icon, ‘‘The Advancement of Learning.” Essays,
Advance of Learning, jVnv Atlantic and Other Places (New York:
Od>-s.scy Press, Inc., 1937). pp. 214-215.

Abraham FIcxncr, Universities: American English German
(New York; 0 >dbrd University Press, 1930). Tlic quotations arc
from pp. 3, 4, 42, 179, 132, 25, 44-45, 197, 193, 231, 235, 197
(again), 178-179.

* Harvard University, The President’s Report, igGt-Ba, p. 3.

’ Hastings Rashdall, T)>r Universities of Europe in the Middle
(3 vols., 1895, cd- F- Powickc and A. B. Emden, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936), III, 358.

" Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education ofTouth
in Pensilvania (Philadelphia, 1749).

' Reports of the Course of Instruction in Yale College fy a Committee
of the Corporation and the Academical Faculty (New Haven, Conn.:
Hezekiah Howe, 1828).

* Allan Nevins, The State Universities and Democracy (Urbana:
University of Ilinois Press, 1962), p. vi.

NOTF-S TO PAGF-S 32 - 5 O 1 20

•'James Br^’ce, The elmerican Commomixallh, new edition (Nw
York; Macmillan, 1914), II, 7111-719.

Paul F. I^zarsfcld, “'Flic Sociology’ of Empirical Social
Rcscai-di," American Soeioht;ica( Rei-iew, December 1962, pp-

David Riesman, Constrainf and VarietY in American Education
(Garden City, N.Y.; Donblcday, 1958), pp. 30-32.

"’Ernest Earnest, Academic Ihocessian (Indianapolis; Bobbs-
Mcrrill, 1953), p. 7.|.

" Rudolph, p. 423.

Eric Ashby, “Self-Government in Modern British Univer-
sities,” Science and Freedom, Dcccmlicr i95fi, p. to.

"Theodore Caplow and Recce J. McGee, The Academic
MarLetplace (New York; Basic Books, 1058), p. 206.

" Millctt, p. 224.

•" \S'ri.ston, p. 172.

" Nevins, pp. 118-119.

” Dodds, p. 43.

’'W. Max Wise, Th^' Come For the Rest of Reasons — College
Students Today (Washington, D.C.; American Council on Educa-
tion, 1958).

Burton R. Clark and Martin Trow, Determinants of College
Student Subndture, unpublished manu-script. Center for the Study
of Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, 1963.

" Robert Bcndincr, “Tlic Non-Teacher,” Horizon, September
J962, p. 14.

" Merle A. Tuve, “Is Science Too Big for the Scientist?”
Saturday firiiiViy, June 6, 1959, p. 49.

Chapter 2; Tlie Realities of the Federal Grant University

' Don K. Price, “The Scientific Establishment,” Science, June
29, 1962.

■ Some of the principal reports, 1960-1963, are as follows;
American Assembly, The Federal Government and Higher Educa-
tion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, i960).

Homer D. Babbidge, Jr., and Robert M. Rosenzweig, The

130

NOTES TO PAGES 5O-54

Federal Interest in Higher Education (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1962).

William G. Bowen, The Federal Government and Princeton uni-
versity: A Report on the Effects of Princeton’s Involvements imth the
Federal Government on the Operations of the University (Princeton
University, 1962).

Julius H. Comroe. Jr., ed.. Research and Medical Education
(Evanston, lU.: Association of American Medical Colleges,
1962).

Charles G. Dobbins, ed., Higher Education and the Federal Gsp-
emment. Programs and Problems (Washington, D.C.: American
Council on Education, 1963).

Harvard and the Federal Government: A Report to the Faculties and
Governing Boards of Harvard University (Harvard University,
September 1961).

Charles V. Kidd, American Universities and Federal Research
(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1959).

J. Kenneth Little, A Survey of Federal Programs in Higher Educa-
tion: Summary Describing the Programs, Participating Institutions, and
the Effects of the Programs on the Institutions (^Vashington, D.C.:
Govenunent Printing Office, 1962).

Harold Orlans, The Effects of Federal Programs on Higher Educa-
tion: A Study of j 6 Universities and Colleges (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution, 1962).

Alice M. Rivlin, The Role of the Federal Government in Financing
Higher Education (Washington, D.C.: Brookmgs Institution,
1961).

Glenn T. Seaborg el ai, Scientific Progress, the Universities and the
Federal Government: A Statement ly the Presidents Science Advisory
Committee, Nov. 15, igSo.

^ These fourteen specialized research centers are:

Columbia Radiation Laboratory (Columbia) — Department
of Defense.

Applied Physics Laboratory (Johns Hopkins) — Department
of the Navy.

Hudson Laboratories (Columbia) — Department of the Navy.
Lincoln Laboratory (I^I.T.) — ^Department of the Air Force.

NOTES TO PAGES 54-67 13 ^

Argonne National Laboratory (Chicago) — Atomic Energy
Commission.

Cambridge Electron Accelerator (Harv'ard and M.I.T.) —
Atomic Energy Commission.

Latvrence Radiation Laboratory (California) — Atomic En-
ergy' Commission.

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (California) — Atomic En-
ergy Commission.

Princeton-Pennsylvania Proton Accelerator (Princeton and
Pennsylvania) — Atomic Enei^ Commission.

Princeton Stellerator (Princeton) — ^Atomic Energy Commis-
sion.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (California Institute of Technol-
ogy ) — National Aeronaudcs and Space Administration.

Brookhaven National Laboratory (Associated Universities,
Inc.) — National Science Foundation.

Kitt Peak Observatoiy (Association of Universities for Re-
search in Astronomy) — Nadonal Science Foundation.

Green Bank Radio Astronomy Observ’atory (Associated
Universities, Inc.)— National Science Foundation and Depart-
ment of the Air Force.

■* Sidney Hook, “The Impact of Expanding Research Sup-
port on the Universides,” in Comroe, ed., pp. 235-237.

“ Malcolm Moos and Francis E. Rourke, The Campits and the
Stale (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins Press, 1959).

® Sec James B. Handler, “An Optimistic View,” in Comroe,
ed., p. 108; “^^'hen asked, they much prefer judgment by a jury
in Washington to the risk of judgment by colleagues at home.”

^ Homer D. Babbidge, Jr., and Robert M. Rosenziveig, “The
Issues,” The Graduate Journal, University ofTe.\as, vol. V (1962),
Supplement, pp. 62-104.

® Dael Wolfle, America’s Resources of Specialized Talent (Neiv
York: Harper, 1954), pp. 190-191, 317-322.

® Orlans, p. 173.

Hook, p. 238.

” Orlans, p. 134.

'■ J. A. Stratton, “Research and the University,” Chemical and
Engineering News, vol. 31, no. 25 Qune 22, 1953), PP- 2582-2583.

132 NOTES TO PAGES 69-74

“ Nathan Pusey, “The Carnegie Study,” in Dobbins, ed., p.
25 -

Don K. Price, Government and Science (New York: New York
University Press, 1954), p. 96.

Logan Wilson, “A New Dimension,” The Graduate Journal,
University of Texas, vol. V (1962), Supplement, p. 164.

Seaborg et al., as cited in note 2, above. See also in this
connection the Report of the President’s Science Advisory
Committee, Meeting Manpower Needs in Science and Technology:
Graduate Training in Engineering, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences,
Dec. 12, 1962.

’’ Roswell L. Gilpatric, The Changing Patterns of Defense Pro-
curement, issued by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, June
19, 1962.

Circular Letter No. 4, Association of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges (Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 1963).

“The situation appears to call for general aid to U.S.
universities patterned somewhat after that provided universities
in the United Kingdom by the University Grants Committee.
In any event, the question arises of direct subsidy to educational
institutions in order to increase the over-all strength of their
departments and to provide greater flexibility in their adminis-
tration.” National Science Foundation, Annual Report, igSo, p.
16.

Also, Sidney Hook, in Comroe, ed., p. 245, says, “Personally,
I see the best solution — not the ideal solution, for there is none
— in the system that today obtains in England, where through
the University Grants Committee the government makes lump
grants to universities that are not earmarked for specific pur-
poses. This system would give a university the necessary au-
tonomy to meet educational needs as it sees them, and permit
the deployment of resources at the key points of its educational
enterprise.”

“"John Walsh, “Congress: Lag in Science Advice Gives
Executive an Advantage,” Science, vol. 139, no. 3549 (Jan. 4,
1963), P. 27.

Harvard and the Federal Government, p. 26.

““ Basil O’Connor, “Science and Government — The Perilous

NOTES TO PAGES 74-87 133

Partnership,” speecli delivered Jan. t6, 1963, at the Third
Symposium on Immunopathology', La Jolla, Calif.

President John F. Kennedy, Message on Education^ Jan. 29,
1963.

Orlans, p. 169. It might be noted that the designations
“public” and “private” have considerably less meaning for the
federal grant universities than they once did for institutions of
higher education.

Orlans, p. 264.

■'’Charles V. Kidd, “The Institute Discussion: Research
Emphasis and Research Itself,” in Comroe, ed., p. 1 20.

■’ Orlans, p. 180.

Alvin M. Weinberg, “Criteria for Scientific Choice,”
Minava, Winter 1962.

See Report to the President on Government Contracting for Research
and Development, prepared by the Bureau of the Budget and
referred to tire Committee on Government Operations, United
States Senate, May 17, 1962; and Operation and Management of
Research and Development Facilities and Programs, Analytical and
Advisor)' Services and Technical Supervision of IVeapons ^'stems and
Other Programs for the Government, In-House and by Contract, pre-
pared by a committee under the chairmanship of Helge Holst,
treasurer and corporate counsel of Arthur D. Little, Inc., and
dated April 17, 1962.

° See the White House spedal message. Improving American
Health, Feb. 7, 1963.

Assembly (note 2, above), p. 199.

’■ McGeorge Bundy, “Of Winds and Windmills: Free Uni-
versities and Public Policy,” in Dobbins, ed. (note 2, above), pp.
96-98.

Chapter 3; The Future of the City of Intellect

‘ Archibald MacLeish, The Next Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 4.

■ Edward F. Denison, Sources of Economic Growth in the United

134 NOTES TO PAGES 87 -IOO

Slala (Nev; Yori:: Committee for Economic Development,
1962).

* Fritz ivfachlup, Tht Produeiim and Disiribulim oj KnmvLtdge in
the United Stales (Princeton, XJ.; Princeton University Press,
1962), pp, 374,399.

’ Rosv.'cll L. Gilpatric, The Changing PalUmi oJ Defense Prcr-
cuTonenl, issued try the Office of the SeaCTetary of Defense. June
19, 1962, p. 7.

^ John Fischer, “The Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Magaejne,
Sqjtember 1961, pp, 10-16.

Allan Nerins, The Slate Unitersities and Derrmcrae^ (Urbana;
Univerrity of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 114,

' C. P, Snov/, noth annrversary banquet speech, Washing-
ton Unis-eirity, St Louis, Mo., Feb, 23, 1963.

'Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect CStsv; York: Harj>er,

1939)-

‘F. M, Comford, Microcosmographia Academka Being a Gtdde
f'jr the Ymmg Academic Poliltcian (Cambridge, Eng.; Dunster
House, 1923), p. 32.

” Harold Laski, “The American College President” Harper’s
Mmlhlj Magazine, February 1932, p. 319; Abraham Eeiner,
Universities: American English German fXevr York: Oxford Uni-
versity Pros, 1930), p. 5.

' Frederick Rudolph, The American College and Unicersitj: A
Histoiy CSevc York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 491.

* Xevitt Sanford, “Higher Education as a Social Problem,”
in Sanford, ed,. The American College: A P^ehohgical and Social
Interpaetalim of the Higher Learning fXev/ York: John Vrilc".' &
Sons, 1962), p, 19.

C, P, Snov,', The Masters (Xev.- York: Macmillan, 1951).
Appendix, p, 382.

Eric^ Ashby, “Self-Government in Modem British Uni-
veirities. Science and Freedom, December 1956, p, 10,

” Frank Pinner, “The Crisis of the State Universiiies: Anakr-
sis^Md Remedies,' in Sanford, ed., p. gi.

Logan Wilson, Academic Man (London: Oxford Unr.-errit%'
Press, 1942), p. 71.

’’ Ashbj', p. 5.

Puportz of the Course of InstrueSion in Yale ColUge Ip a OjmmUlee

NOTES TO PAGES 1 00- 1 25 1 35

of the Corporation and the Academical Faculty (New Haven, Conn.:
Hezekiah Howe, 1828), in American Journal of Scinice and Arts,
vol. 15 (January- 1829), p. 298.

’’J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Science and die Human Com-
munity,” in Charles Frankcl, cd., Issues in University Education
(New York; Harper, 1959), pp. 56, 58.

■° Beardsley Ruml, Memo to A College Trustee; A Report on
Financial and Stnictural Problems of the Liberal College (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1959).

Comford, p. 4.

■■James Bryant Conant, Education in A Divided World (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Har\»ard UnK-ersity Press, 1949), pp. 158, 171.

■’John May-nard Keynes, The General Theory (New York:
Harcoun Brace, 1936), p. 383.

■* David Riesman, Constraint and Variety in American Education
(Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday, 1958), p. 33.

■’ C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Ret'olulion (New
York; Cambridge University Press, 1959).

’"Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, trans. H. A. T.Reiche
and H. F. Vandcrschmldt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 46.

■’Sir Walter Mobcrly, The Crisis in the University (London;
SCM Press, 1949), P- 20.

” George W. Beadle, “The University of X,” Context, Fall
1961.

■" Riesman, p. 64.

Lee DuBridge, “The Shajjc of the Future,” Engineering and
Scimce, California Institute ofTcchnology, February 1962, p. 13.
Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, and
arles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge,
Mass.; Harvard University Press, i960).

A. N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education & Other Essays (New
York; Macmillan, 1929), pp. 22-23.

INDEX

Academic emphases, sliift in, i iQ-i 13
Acceleration of work, 109
Adams, Charles K., 13
AdnunUtration, 27-28; and federal
funds, 67; problem of relating to fac-
ulty and students, lao
Agricultural Experiment Stations, 52
Agricultural Extension Service, 52
Agriculture, schools of, 15
Alumni, rising sense of concern of, 102-
103

American Assembly, 50, 83
American Council on Education, 50
Angcll, James B., 13,33*34
Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 32
Argonne Laboratory, 48
Arts, creative, tig
Ashby, Erie, 31, 97, 98
Athletics, i6, 90
Atomic Energy Commission, 54

Bacon, Sir Erancis, quoted, 2
Balance, problems of, 55-69, 69-75, * ■ 3"

U4

Barnard, Etedcrick, 13
Bataun, Jacques, 94
Beadle, George, 12a
Berlin, University of, 5, it
Biology, n 1-112
Bologna, University of, to, 20, 25
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 24, 105
Brookings Institution, 50
Brown University, 13
Bryce, Lord, 32
Bundy, McGeorgc, 22, 83
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 76
“Bureaucratic balance,” 51, 69-75

Bush, Vannevar, 48

Business administration, schools of, 15

Butler, Nicholas Murray, 33

Calendars, rearrangement of, 109
California, University of; growth, 7-8;

Lawrence Radiation T-aboratory , 46
Cambridge University, to, 25, 26; fac-
ulty control at, 22; administration, 27,
28; and the faculty guild, 96, 97; re-
search at, 98
Carnegie Foundation, 50
Change*, problems of, to6-io8; new faces
of, 108-118; still to come, iifi -123
Chicago, University of, 17; extension
programs, t 6 ; Argonne Laboratory, 4B
Clark, Burton R., 41

Colleges, U,S,, 12; junior, io 3

Columbia University, s6

Commons, John R-, 16

Compton, Karl T., 48

Conant, James Bryant, 18,48. 113

Concentration, inevitability of, 63*64

Cornell University, 48

Cornford, F. M., 96, 107

Corson, John J,, 20

Council of Advisers on Education, 83

Day, Jeremiah, 22
Department, creation of, 1 1
Department of Agriculture, 54
Department of Defense, 54
Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, 50

DiscipUnes, unlScation of, itg-ieo

Doctors, federal support for training of,
82-83

138

INDEX

Dodds, Harold W., 31
Drop-outs, problem of, 76
Dublin, Univctsity oii 2
DuBridgc, Lee, 123

Elective system, 12, 13, 14, 21-22, 23
Eiiot, Charles W,, 12, 13, 17, 18, 32, 35
En^eering, schools oL 15
En^ncering, Science and Management
War Training Prt^ram, 52
Erasmus, 95

External imperatives, 103-108
Extracurricular programs, 2J

Faculty: influence of, 22-23; life in mul-
tiversity, 42-44; and the un-laculty,
flj-fly; competition for, 109-110; sala-
ries and fringe benefits, log-iio
Faculty guild idea, 95-102
Federal Housing Authority, 3 i
Fed^ support; of education, 51-55; of
sdentific research, 48-49, 33-53, 60-
69; suggestions concerning, 75-84
Flexner, Abraham; on the idea of a uni-
versity, 4; on Harvard, 5; complaints
regarding universities, 5-6; on Johns
Hopkins, 13; and the univeiaty as an
organism, 20; on the university presi-
dent, 30-3]; on the autocratic prea-
33; on the professorial, 44; on
the conservatism of universities, 96
Folwell, William W',, 13
Foundations, 105
France, university patterns in, 93
Franklin, Benjamin, 12
Frandizi, Risicn', 21

Galileo, 95

Germany: rebirth of university in, 11; in-
fluence on American universities, i8,
47-48; public control in, 24; facultv^
class structure in, 97
‘‘GX Bill,” 52

Gilman, Daniel Coit, 13
Gilpatric, Roswell L., 70
Gilpatric report, 70, 89
Gottingen, il, 12
Governance, multiversity, 18-28
Graduate centers, tog
Graduate fcUowsUp programs, 81-82
Graduate school, development ol, 13-14
Greai Britain, influence ol^ 18; “public”
control in, 25

Growth, university, 108-1 10
Halle, 1 1

Harper, William Rainey, 13
Harvard University: Flexner on, 5;
growth of, 7; Ticknor’s attempts to re-
form, 12; under Eliot, 13; and the land
grant movement, 15, 48; faculty power
at, 22, 23; general education program,
23; self-study, 50, 74; MacLcisb on,
83-86; medical school, 115
Hatch Act (1887), 5*

Hofrtadter, Richard, 25
Holland, 23
Home economics, 15
Hook, Sidney, 57
Hme of InUlltd, 94
Humboldt, \lfilhelm von, ii
Hutchins, Robert hL, 17, 23; idea of a
university, 20; on the university presi-
dent, 31-32, 33, 40; as last of the p-
ants, 33

Weopolis, rise 0!, 91-94
Industry, and the universities, 89-91
Informal influences, 26-27
Institute, creation ofl : i
Instruction: growing concern with qualit)'
ofl 103-J03; mechanization of, 109;
undergraduate, improvement ofl 1 1&-
119

Intellect, organized, 123-126
“Intuitive imbalance,” 51, 33-89

INDEX

139

Italy, govcrmncnl control in, 54

JclTcrson, Tltoina'i, 12, si, 34
Johns Hopkins University, 13
Jordan, David Starr, 13, 83
Jowett, Benjamin, 32

Kidd, Charles V,, 78
“Kno'vledgt industry,” 87-9 1

Land Grant rkssociation, 72
Land grant movement, ts-iC, 46-48
Laski, Harold, 96

Latin America, aG; student power in, 21;

government control, in, 24
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, 48
Lazaisfeld, Paul, 33
l/hfmhnt, it, 14, 44
Umfrnhnl, 11, 14, 42
Library, emphasis on, 12
Lincoln, Abraham, 46
Lincoln Laboratory, 48
London, University of, 5-6
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 16-17, *81 3 ^

MaeWup, Frila, 88
MacLcish, Archibald. 85
Marcus Aurelius. &t Antoninus
Mant, Karl, 125

Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
1 15; Lincoln Laboratory, 48; location,

89.

Michigan, Univewity of, 13, 15
Mill, John Stuart, 96
Millett, John D,, 31
Morality, campus, toG
Morrill, James L., gt
Morrill Act (1862), 15, 46, 5t
Morrill Act, Second (1890), 51
MuiUvenity; historical origins of, 9-18;
governance of, 18-28; life in, 41-45

Niune, importance of, 19-20

Napoleon. Sti Bonaparte
NASA (National Aeronautics and Spec
Administration), 54, 7 '

National Defense Education Act, 57 >

8 '

National Defense Research Committee,

55 .

National Education Improvement Act,
proposed, 70

National Foundation for Higher Educa-
tion, 80-81

National Institutes of Health, 54, 7 t.
82

National Science Foundation, 54, 71, 81,
82

National Youth Administration, 52
Nevins, Allan, 15, 35 . 9 '

Ncwm.an, Cardinal, 2-3
Nctvton, Isaac, 95

Nobel Price winners, concentration of,

9t.92 , „

Northwest Ordinance of 1785, 5I

Office of Scientific Research and Dcv'el-
opmem, 52

Oppenheimer, Robert S., tot
Orlans, Harold, 64, 77
Ortega y Gassett, Josfi, 21
Oxford University, to, 25, 26, 96, 97, 98:
faculty control at, 22; administration,
27, 28

Paris, University of, to, 22, 25
Pennsylvania, Univenity of, la
Philadelphia, College of. S,t Pennsylva-
nia, University of
Plato, 9

President, university. 29-36; as mediator,

36-41

President’s Science Advisory Committee,

50. 72

Price, Don K., 48, 69
Fiinccton University, 13, 5 “

140

INDEX

Problems of change, : 05-1 08
Professions, shifting emphasis in needs
for, 1 1 1

Professor, established as great figure, 11
Project system, 77-80
Public authority, 24-26
Pusey, Nathan, 6, 69
Pythagoreans, 9

Rashdall, Hastings, to
Research funds, federal, 53-55
Riesman, David, 39, 122
Rockefeller Foundation, 82
ROTC program, 52
Rudolph, Frederick, 31, 34, 96
Ruml, Beardsley, 106
Russia, 24; as spur to scientific revolu-
tion, 49; university development pat-
terns in, 93

Salaries, faculty, tog, no
Salerno, to
Sanford, Nevitt, 97
Schumpeter, Joseph, 34
Scientific research, federal support of,
48-49, 53-55, 60-69
Seaborg report, 70
Sinclair, Upton, 31
Smith-Lever Act (1914), 52
Snow,C,P.,gi,97, iig
Sophists, 8, 9

Spain, student power in, 21
Sports. Su Athletics
Stanford Research Institute, 90
Sterling Forest, 89
Stratton, Julius A,, 67
Students, 20-22; multiversity, 41-42;
teaching graduate vs. teaching under-
graduate, 64-65; undergraduate, rest-
lessness in, 103-105

Talent, concentration of^ 91-93
Tappan, Henry, 13, 17; Angell on, 33-34
Teaching, of undergraduates vs. gradu-
ates, 64-65. See also Instruction
Ticknor, Professor George, 12
Trow, Martin, 41

United States, development of uruversity
in, 12

Universities: evolution oft 4-9; 18th-
century European, lO-ii; American,
second transformation oft B6-94; cli-
ches concerning, 94; growth of, 108-
iio; involvement in life of soaety,
ii4-it8

University Grants Committee (British),

72, 105

Van Hise, Charles, 16
Veblen, Thoistein, 31
Virginia, University of, 12

Wallis, Alen, 59
Washington, professors in, 1 15
Wayland, Francis, 13, 34
Weinberg, Alvin M., 78
Wheeler, Benjamin Ide, 13, 33, 34
IVltite, Andrew Dickson, 13
Whitehead, Alfred North, 126
Wilson, Logan, 6g
Wilson, Woodrow, 34
Wisconsin, Univerrity oft 16
“Wisconsin Idea,” 16, 21
Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 82
Work Prcgects Administration, 52
Wriston, Henry M., 31

Yale University, 99; in 1828, 12-13: si**'
tive system at, 13, 14; faculty power at,
22